The life cycle of the butterfly/A practical learning experience
Clonown
N.S.
Martin and Stephen were
outside Clonown N.S. They saw a White butterfly come into the garden. It was
looking for a good spot to lay its eggs. It was sniffing around with its
feelers. It landed on the nasturtiums. “This is a good spot. My eggs will turn
into caterpillars and they will eat nasturtiums.’’(Caterpillars usually only eat
one type of plant)
A
few days later Shane O Conner was looking at the nasturtium leaves. Caterpillars
were eating the leaves and eating and eating and eating. He tried to see the
caterpillars12 tiny eyes but they were very small. The caterpillar was holding
on to the leaves with its front 3 pairs of legs. It was climbing up stalks with
its back 5 pairs of legs.
Aoife and Edel get some
leaves with caterpillars on them. They brought them into the classroom. The
teacher made a butterfly bottle.
The teacher got a plastic
bottle, scissors, glue and gauze. She cut holes in the bottle and covered the
holes with gauze.
The teacher cut the bottom
off the bottle and put it sitting in a flowerpot of sand. The infants put the
caterpillars inside.
Amy and Emma brought the
caterpillars fresh leaves everyday. They brought them nasturtiums leaves because
they were caterpillars of the white butterfly.
One morning when the
children came to school they were looking for the
caterpillar.
One of them spotted it
dangling from the bottle. It looked very weird. Its skin had hardened and it was
not hairy any more. It looked like a reptile. It was lying very
still.
The children realized that
it had changed into a pupa and was waiting to turn into a butterfly in the
spring.
Now everybody got excited
about butterflies. The infants went out with some butterfly nets. In this
picture Emma caught a tortoiseshell butterfly on the Michaelmas daisies. She put
the net over the butterfly very carefully so that she wouldn’t damage the
wings.
When we went inside more
butterflies arrived.
This is a picture of a red
admiral and tortoishell. They are sipping nectar from the Michaelmas daisies. I
wish I were a butterfly!
Spring came and so did
Summer.
We left the bottle on the
window in the hall for the winter because it was cool there. Spring came and so
did Summer. Suddenly one day in mid May we looked at the upturned bottle (we had
turned it upside-down so that when the chrysalis changed into a butterfly it
would be able to escape.) A wonderful thing had happened! A butterfly had
squeezed out of the chrysalis. We brought it into the classroom so that we could
all take a look.
This is what the butterfly
looked like. We could see its legs and feelers quite clearly. It was resting
with its wings together like butterflies usually do.
The chrysalis was empty. It
looked just like a shell.
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