A couple of weeks ago, we got a very special delivery into our school. It was a container of baby caterpillars. Over the past couple of weeks, we have been examining the growth of these caterpillars. We have been observing the changes that have occurred and their different stages of life.
 




The caterpillars started off very small and ate lots and lots of food. They formed j-shapes and hung from the bottom of their containers. They formed chrysalides and built cocoons around themselves. They waited like this for a number of days… We were growing impatient waiting for something to happen!
      

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Finally, beautiful Monarch butterflies popped out of their cocoons. They were very pretty and brightly coloured. We worked creatively on lots of different activities to do with butterflies over this time. We read the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We sequenced the story using pictures of the main events and we did a literary review on it. We also created a background for a digital report on the story.
 



Together, we made up a story about Starlight, a clever, resourceful butterfly who got herself out of a tricky situation with a wicked witch. We made our own creative stories about butterflies and digitised them using the Scratch app. We constructed 3D butterflies which we hung from the roof too.
 

 
 
 
 
 

 

On the 9th of June we waved goodbye and set our butterflies free. It was a magical experience watching them grow and develop over the last couple of weeks.