Wet Wednesday

Hello Everyone,
    We have had a very good start to our school year.  We are into our 2nd week and it's a hot one.  We are all sweating in this 90 degree heat.  We have taken lots of water breaks and tried to keep the lights off as much as we can.  It's a good thing that we have 2 fans blowing the hot air around our room.
     Some exciting news is that we seem to have a monarch caterpillar farm in our room.  Mrs. Hansen brought in several jars with caterpillars chomping on milkweeds to our classroom.  One went into a chrysalis on the 2nd day and will emerge this week sometime.  We came in one morning to find all the leaves in one jar gone (all eaten) and  one caterpillar in chrysalis stage and 3 more on the sides of the glass.  2 were just little tiny babies.  We didn't realize that there were eggs on the leaves.  As the morning progress one child saw another baby  in another jar.  We moved all active caterpillars to our butterfly netted box.  I put some fresh milkweed leaves in for them to munch on.  At the end of that day I just happened to look at the ziplock bag with our extra leaves and noticed some "caterpillar poop" in it.  When I looked inside there was another caterpillar munching away.  So we are loaded we caterpillars and chrysalis'.  We have been observing the changes everyday.  It has been very exciting for our class.  We can't wait for them to emerge from their chrysalis'.  We hope it happens while we are in school and not over a weekend but Mother Nature may have different ideas.
    We have been checking out lots of books for butterfly life cycle information.  We have about 10 books with lots of pictures.  Many pictures match what we are doing in class.
    This year our school is studying the country of Mexico.  Our monarch butterfly project is a great tie-in.  Our butterflies will be making the long journey to Mexico as part of their migration track.  We will be participating with other classes in an internet project on the Butterfly migration.  I am so glad our class can experience this first hand.
     I'm glad you stopped by to check out what's happening in first grade.  Leave us a comment below and be sure to vote in our butterfly survey.
Mrs. Dietsche