Butterflies!

Last week or so we shared the exciting news that we had caterpillars in our classroom. Nine in fact, nice sneaky, and hungry caterpillars! They ate and ate and ate for it seemed like, FOREVER!!! But all nine of them did exactly as they were supposed to do and made themselves a cozy little chrysalis. They sat their for over a week, and the children began to tire of watching them. It's so hard waiting!

One morning I came downstairs to find that one of the chrysalis' had changed to a dark brown rather than a light brown colour. You could also see the colours of the wings through the chrysalis. I was no expert, but I figured it must be time!

So we got some sugar water ready, just in case!

Then we noticed this red 'blood' on the table... long before we even noticed that not one, but two butterflies had emerged while we had been outside. We read up and discovered that this blood was essentially the butterflies waste that had gathered during the chrysalis stage.

There's one!

The interest had started again, and the children enjoyed reading the butterflies stories. I have to point out that we had to fashion an 'addition' on the outside of the enclosure, because one sneaky caterpillar squeezed out of the enclosure and made a nice little chrysalis on the outside!

Some children even drew pictures of the butterflies....

.... and hung them up for the butterflies to see.

Then came the day we had to say goodbye. They had been flying like crazy in the enclosure, so it was only right to set them free. So I let a few go on Sunday, but we had a couple more that were ready as well. It was a bit overcast and perhaps a bit chilly, so they hung around for a while. But off they flew.

Some children were even able to hold one of two on their hands.

Which meant everyone wanted a turn.

Eventually the ones that have emerged (we still have two more in their chrysalis) were set free. We are sad to report that in all the excitement, one got overlooked and accidentally got stepped on :(

We think they're pretty happy outside.

We're also excited to share a video we captured of one of our early butterflies that had just emerged and was pumping the blood into it's wings!