C is for Caterpillar

You might remember J4 and I doing some caterpillar fun with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He's been keeping such a fine notebook for it and a bit ago he dot painted the letter C.

He's also been keeping a notebook for his studies with The Salamander Room. And of course lots of little bitty creatures are mentioned in The Salamander Room. So, we finally got our caterpillars from Insect Lore and we've been watching them grow from tiny to HUGE.

One day, when the caterpillars were nice and plump, they all started up for the ceiling and made themselves hang upside down. It was really cool to see them hanging there as caterpillars and over a few days transform into a pupal stage.

Today it was time to get our chrysalises into the mesh habitat. I really thought Dan should have the pleasure, but he voted me because I am the biology teacher. So true. Yet, a have a dislike of insects across the board.

Stumped...so they say to open gently, but the lid is really hard to get off the container. R9 caught me with a look on my face that says, "NOW What?"

Taking the paper thing the chrysalises are hanging from and getting them into the mesh bag...without something bad happening was tricky business.

Pinning the paper circle to mesh habitat. We are close now!

This is what our caterpillars came in- very cool!

Home Sweet Home- all set for coming out of there in the adult stage. I hope we get to see some of the next stage as it happens.

This has been a lot of fun for everyone. We have some tadpoles right now as well. More on those later.

For now, we'll be adding to the caterpillar book with some cool photos of our caterpillars and chrysalises.

Today J4 even happened upon a caterpillar on this leg that he tried making a habitat for in the wooded play set area and he grew somewhat frustrated that his caterpillar kept walking out of it!