Pet Caterpillar

Zilla is 5 years old

Mega is 2 years old

As the weather warms up the kids feel the pull to be outside for I creasing lengths of time. With the coming of spring they have enjoyed seeing the "garden" come alive. We have a a small parking area outside our living room door which they call the backyard or garden.

They found this little "caterpillar" (I'm not sure if it is actually one but the term works for our purposes...) and put it in the bug box for observation.

They decided to take notes and draw pictures to record what they saw.

This kind of activity is something totally unplanned but because we had the tools in place (prepared environment) they were able to take the teachable moment and run with it.

They observed that Catapilly (the name they gave it) would curl up and stop moving when frightened, climbed on leaves and sticks in the box and it even stopped to munch on a leaf from time to time.

 

While Zilla was at school Mega was on observation duty and she takes her responsibility seriously!

At 6:30 this morning while I was just getting ready for the day I hear the kids outside talking about going for a walk. When I went to investigate I discovered they meant giving Catapilly a chance to take a walk!

Since they have been so engrossed with their new "pet" I gave them the book "From Caterpillar to Butterfly" to look at. We have an oversized edition which seemed to add to the reading fun!

 

One of the greatest thing about this whole Catapilly experience is at the kids have been able to do nearly everything on their own. They know where the supplies are, they worked together to figure out what would make Catapilly happy and to figure out the best way to make observations. I love that they are at this stage! It makes my job easy :-)

 

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