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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 itsfeelers. 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 ying very still.   The children realised 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!

  We left the bottle on the window in the hall for the winter because it was cool  there. Winter came,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 crysalis. 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.

When the butterfly opened its wings it looked lovely. It was not exactly white but lemon coloured. It flew on to the window and stayed for hours drying its wings in the sun. Then it flew out the window. It was probably looking for more nasturtium leaves to lay its eggs on. Then the butterfly cycle would start all over again!