Not only did Rosella enjoy their Christmas Fun Day today and farewell a dear classmate, but our second butterfly emerged as well! Full on excitement again as we witnessed this amazing transformation once again from chrysalis to beautiful butterfly. Our second butterfly was set free in the Quiet Area to begin the next phase of its life.
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After exploring and experiencing the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly this term, Rosella consolidated our knowledge of this amazing process by creating plasticine models of each stage. We did a great job and have now created a wonderful memento of our work this term that we can keep and hang up at home. Our butterfly was set free this afternoon in the Quiet Area at school after the storm had passed. Our butterfly was a female; the black webbing on the wings was thicker than the webbing on a male and she had no identifying wing spots like the male Monarch has. Our butterfly will live a short, but very busy life. She will live for about a month to six weeks and will fly around to find new milkweed plants on which to lay her eggs. She will take nectar from flowers to maintain her energy levels while she lays hundreds of eggs. The cycle of life begins again! At 7:00am this morning you could see a butterfly fully formed within the chrysalis skin that was now see-through! Not long now! As the lunchtime bell rang just before 11:00am, and Rosella started to go out and get their lunchboxes, one of our children saw the butterfly emerging! Excitement levels were super high as all the children realised what was happening and came over to watch this amazing final stage of the life cycle. Our butterfly emerged with the metamorphosis now complete from pupa (chrysalis) to a beautiful adult Monarch butterfly. The butterfly started to inflate its wings with fluid contained in its swollen abdomen. Its wings then took on their more regular shape. The butterfly had a rest while its wings began to dry. We waited a couple of hours and then we were able to gently hold the butterfly before its wings become fully dry and it's ready to be set free. Rosella have thoroughly enjoyed this unit of work on life cycles and have been so enthusiastic to take part in this wonderful journey of discovery. And it's not over yet! We have one more chrysalis and look forward to another butterfly emerging, hopefully next week. We all love 'scratch art' drawing in Rosella! Today it was a caterpillar/butterfly picture to draw in L3 groups time. Please take a look at our fabulous creations. Rosella have been looking at lots of different butterflies and we have now realised that butterfly wings are beautiful examples of symmetry in nature. This means that the wings on one side of the butterfly's body match the wings on the opposite side of its body. Butterfly's wings are in fact mirror images of each other. We started making our butterflies yesterday by folding our art paper in half and carefully painting on only one half of our paper. We folded it back down and had fun pressing the two halves together. (We had a butterfly wing outline on the back of our paper.) Once cut out our beautiful, colourful butterfly wings were created. We finished by adding our butterfly's body today. They are now flying at the back of our classroom with our ants, bees and ladybirds!
Rosella enjoyed making a beautiful butterfly sculpture today. We used a stone, pipe cleaners of different lengths, a flower and of course our brightly coloured butterfly. We think they look fabulous!
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About UsRosella is a class of 17 happy and enthusiastic children excited to be in Kindergarten at Helensburgh PS in 2017. Our teachers are Mrs Jan Fuller (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday) and Mrs Sue Dowling (Thursday and Friday) Our school is in NSW, Australia. Please feed Jig an apple and spray him clean if he rolls in the mud!
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