just another morning here

All packed and ready to go – wish me luck, I don’t think I’ve got anyone to be cynical with so I might just have to be spiritual instead. Or bury my nose in a book or six, I stocked up at Waterstones at the weekend

The only thing I’m still umming and aaahing about is our butterfly box. The caterpillars pupated almost three weeks ago, so they’re due to hatch any day now. One chrysalis has darkened in a threatening manner, I seem to remember that’s what happened just before the butterflies came out. One of the five fell off the top, so we’ve got that one ready to take with us but I’m not sure it will hatch, then again I’m not sure about carting the box to Minehead with us, will the remaining four survive if I move them around? I don’t know how delicate they are at this stage. Decisions, decisions. Somehow I will feel very gutted if Steve texts us a picture of them rather than us being able to watch them. While I was bored one day I uploaded the file of our Caterpillar/Butterfly journal from two years ago, so if anyone’s interested it’s here – crappy photos, but it gives a good idea – how stupid will I look carting that box into our Spring Harvest chalet?

Anyway, I’m taking the laptop with us for Zoombinis-style entertainment, but I doubt there will be internet at Butlins, it’s not as good as Hesfes , so all will be quiet here for a week or so …

This post just gathers together everything we’ve done on this topic. I’ve mainly done it with Josiah although the girls have been involved as well, because they can’t stand not to be

During March we had some caterpillars from the Formative fun/Insectlore Butterfly garden kit, which we watched grow and pupate. We actually did this a couple of years ago as well and really enjoyed it, so it was nice for Joe to be a bit more involved with this lot! We didn’t manage to actually see any of the butterflies emerging, but we observed them once they had hatched and Josiah enjoyed releasing them.

We made a caterpillar crawling through a leaf from these instructions.

We put together a window wheel showing the four stages in a butterfly’s life cycle, and used some sequencing cards to support this.

We made a flap book about the days of the week, and used sequencing cards for each section of the story to go with them. Josiah also wrote out the days of the week and we put them in another lapbook section.

We talked about food and the things we eat, and what makes a healthy diet. Just for fun, we had a meal that was the same as the Very Hungry Caterpillar’s food on Saturday and Joe tried all the different flavours.

We collected vocabulary words in another section of the lapbook, including the days of the week, number words, food related words, etc.

And we did lots of artwork for the lapbook and for fun.

We released the third and fourth butterflies today. This morning the dodgy winged one looked like he wasn’t going anywhere, but by lunchtime he’d disappeared so either a bird got him, or maybe he managed to sort himself out and fly after all. We’re expecting that the fifth chrysalis will hatch on Friday.

We did a field trip today as part of our Butterfly project, to the Buckfast Butterfly Farm … which also includes the Otter Sanctuary. The children really enjoyed seeing all the different kinds of butterflies in the tropical greenhouse, lots of chrysalides, and other interesting things like quail! We saw the otters be fed, watched them swimming, saw their webbed feet, and even got to see a baby otter in a nest with his mother. We then had a picnic near the steam railway at Buckfastleigh, now we’re home and about to go and pick up some friends from school. I thought I’d got out of doing the school run but obviously not!

News of the day is that the children have a new cousin – Caleb Ian Thomas, born to Mark and Heidi at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford this morning, weighing 8lbs 5oz. We’re looking forward to seeing a pic of him soon.

The butterflies have hatched! Big excitement here on Sunday as we watched the first three emerge from their chrysalides. We released two of them this morning but one has a bit of a dodgy wing, so he’s not going anywhere. The fourth one hatched this afternoon – we missed it . Anyway, here are some pics.

Have been busy doing all sorts of other things … finally got round to making panpipes (Ecuadorian ones, of course), and had a great time on Cathedral Green yesterday with a bunch of Roman Centurions. Abbie particularly enjoyed being part of the army marching up and down, while Anna liked the stalls showing Roman food/cooking and mosaics, armour, and Roman artefacts. A great followup/review of our Roman project!