We got a fun package from the UPS man yesterday! Thirty-two live caterpillars!
They are much bigger than the ones we ordered in
2008, so I'm sure they won't be hanging around as caterpillars as long. We are going into a Life Cycle unit in our little homeschool and I am planning on having the kids do real science experiments. They will present their projects at a science fair at the end of May.
The first thing I had to do was figure out how to keep them from being harassed by the younger set of kids. At first I was going to set up the chick brooder, but 32 little cups don't take up that much room. They are living in a pizza box and we attached little velcro dots to the bottom of the cups to keep them from tipping over.
We moved them from the big cup to the smaller cups using a paint brush. Did you know these caterpillars have silk, just like a spider? They create little webs inside their cups which make it really hard to move them, even with a paintbrush!
We held our first "Observation Lab" today and each kid chose a caterpillar to be "theirs." They will watch their caterpillars grow and change over the course of the next few weeks. The other caterpillars will be exposed to different temperatures to see how crysallid formation and butterfly emergence is affected. We will also take a few out of their cups to experiment with tropisms.
And just in case you think I came up with all these experiment ideas by myself...I didn't. I have a cool book that I ordered in 2008 with the caterpillars (only 5 back then). The book says that kids as young as Kindergarten can do the experiments, but back then IJ was my only school aged kid and he was the Kindergartener. A preschooler, a toddler, a baby on the way, and the flu kept me from overdoing it last time! It's different now...except the whole toddler and baby on the way part...
