Caterpillars and Chrysalides

Our caterpillars kept eating and growing, and over the weekend they all formed a chrysalis. Now we are just waiting for the butterflies! Here are a few of the learning activities we've been doing alongside observing our live friends.

Caterpillar Stamping Art

Butterfly Writing Journals

I plan to do a more detailed post about these journals once we are finished, but we have been "writing" in these journals every day about the things we are learning. 

Small World/Dramatic Play

I made these little caterpillars by twisting to pieces of pipe cleaner together. The kids created all sorts of dramatic play games using these and some small play butterflies. Here they are trying to get their caterpillars to hang upside down in a "J" shape, like ours did when they were getting ready to form a chrysalis. 

It was exciting to watch two of our caterpillars get into the hanging "J" position while we were in class.  

Lots of Butterfly Books

We have been reading lots of books about caterpillars and butterflies. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a classic, but I also love Ten Little Caterpillars by Bill Martin Jr. It is great for talking about different kinds of caterpillars, and the various things that a caterpillar might do or encounter in its brief life. 

We practiced counting and subtraction skills while we read, as we took away caterpillars for each page. 

Chrysalide Observation

After about a week, we were able to observe the caterpillars in chrysalis form. 

 Once the chrysalides were hard enough, we carefully moved them to the butterfly habitat, in preparation for the butterflies. This gave us the opportunity to look at them a little more closely. 

Next week we should be able to see how they've changed into butterflies!

The Caterpillars are Here!

At the end of March, I ordered these live caterpillars and a butterfly habitat to use for a learning unit. For some reason there was a delay in processing my order and I kept having to push back the unit...but they finally came over the weekend! I'm really excited to watch this process with my students over the next few weeks.

So this week we will be studying the life of a caterpillar,

with our 5 new caterpillar friends as the main attraction!

Planting Seeds

First we explored the seeds and their different shapes and sizes.

Then we used our Garden Sensory Bin to fill our cups with dirt and plant our seeds. We gave them some water and made sure to find them a place in the sun.

We made predictions about how many days it would take our seeds to sprout,

and will be tracking the progress using these Seed Journals.

Let's hope they grow! :)

Exploring Rain

I have a couple of rain sticks that I have been using in class recently. When we first started using them, one student asked if it was really raining inside my stick. As I often do with questions like that, I asked "What do you think?" The kids had some cute ideas about what could be inside the rain stick, but ultimately they came to the conclusion that it must be something small. One student decided it was probably beans. I think kids often learn more from thinking through a question and listening to other people's ideas than when I just explain something and move on, and so I love it when conversations come up like this naturally.

I also love it when I can adapt my planning to match their interests, and did some research about how to make rain sticks. This is my first time attempting this project, so I was learning right along with the kids. Traditionally, a rain stick would be made using some sort of tube and then nails or sticks. But some have also tried using aluminum foil and that seemed a little more manageable for my purposes. So we all did the fine motor work of twisting and smashing the foil to make curvy snakes.

One thing I learned as we did this was that you might need to adapt the thickness of your foil snakes, depending on the size of cardboard tube. Some of the tubes I had were thinner, and they probably would have turned out better if the foil snakes were a bit thinner as well. But in preschool we are all about the process, and the students worked hard to fit their snakes inside their tubes regardless.

Then I helped to get a bottom secured on their tube using colored duct tape, and the filling began. We started out only using beans, and then later added rice. A couple students would fill their tube, shake it a little to listen to the sounds, dump it all out, and start all over again. Like I said, we are all about the process around here. :)

Everyone's stick turned out differently. We spent some time listening to each other's sticks and talking about the different sounds. The ones with mostly rice were much more quiet than the ones with mostly beans. We also had fun making our own rainstorm and dancing with the sticks.

To extend this activity, we spent some time exploring rain in other ways as well. I have seen pictures of this activity all over the internet, and I wanted to use it to show how rain water accumulates in the clouds and then falls down to the earth. This is really simple, using only water, shaving cream, and food coloring...but I totally forgot to add some water to the food coloring before putting it onto the cloud, so at first it didn't do much for us. But it was an easy fix, and the kids loved squirting water into the cloud after we had already done the food coloring.

We also tried some dripping rain process art using glue.

The kids went to town putting glue dots- and puddles- all over their papers.

Then we hung them up in the bathtub to let them drip like rain while they were drying. This was definitely the best part.

Gardening Sensory Bin

This month we are exploring spring, and I moved our sensory bin outside so that we could have some hands-on gardening play (without me worrying about getting dirt everywhere in the classroom).

This was a really fun bin to put together, and I found most of the materials at the Dollar Tree, including the potting soil, flowers, gardening tools, and smaller pots. I already had the larger clay pots, and really like the variety of sizes they added. 

Gorilla was an immediate fan, and started playing with it before I was even finished setting it up. 

I was excited to show it to the preschool kids the next day. It was an engaging addition to our usual outside play activities. 

I just love spring! I'm really excited about some of my plans for activities this month. We're going to have some great learning adventures as we explore this season.