Some of those exciting things are happening in our Discovery Center! This is what is normally known as Science! :)
We put out a little butterfly tent on Friday in our Discovery Centre with some caterpillars, a plant, and some pupa in it. We came to school this morning to see 2 beautiful Monarch Butterflies hatched! We want some photo documentation of this to display in our classroom, and for the children to reflect on, since it all happened so quickly.
Here are some photos I took!
This was so amazing! The chrysalis right before the monarch broke out!
One of the little caterpillars that are crawling around in our tent!
A monarch right after we tagged him. Wondering about the importance of tagging a monarch. Check this out!
The pupa leftovers.
Both of our monarchs ready to be released!
You can see what an exciting day this must have been. Now I will say-my teaching partner and I were excited to see the butterflies this morning but we really wanted to test the observational abilities of our kinders. Soooooo-as hard as it was, we didn`t say anything and sure enough-as soon as we went to our centers to learn-a little girl noticed! We had a table available this morning for children to document what they were seeing in the discovery center-and they took full advantage of the center. We left out paper, crayons and pencil crayons, and many of them sat down and tried their hardest at creating an observation.
This was one of the observations that was documented by an SK student. Caterpillar and Butterfly-both positioned at the top of the paper, as this is exactly where she observed them to be in the tent.
We really wanted their observations to be their own. We said very little unless we were asked questions. We will put out some butterfly life cycle books, books about caterpillars etc. to expand on their inquiry.
All of these exciting things that are happening really have me anxious to see what this year will bring! :)
If you have any suggestions on how we could expand on this in our room. Please, please leave me a comment! I LOVE suggestions!! :)
I`ll be back tomorrow to show you what my awesome husby has helped me with for the classroom! :)
Hi Megan, just found your blog and I've been reading your posts with interest. I live and work in BC and we've been following what has been happening in Ontario Kindergarten classes closely. It may happen here too.
ReplyDeleteI love the concept of team teaching with an ECE in the classroom as a partner. Finally.
I facilitate a StrongStart program which is a Ministry of Education program for families. It's free and we are part of the schools. This is my sixth year but I've only been blogging since April 2010.
We raise butterflies every year and every year it is just as exciting. Here is a link to a list of ideas we've done http://strongstart.blogspot.ca/search/label/butterflies
Now back to reading your posts.