Our Swan Plant
This Term our Inquiry topic is around Life Cycles and as part of this we are creating a Butterfly Garden in the Junior School. Room 5 now also have our very own swan plant to take care of. Follow the plant on its journey...
Day 1 - Tuesday 21st February - We transplanted our swan plant into a bigger bucket with holes drilled at the bottom to allow the water to drain.
Day 2 - Wednesday 22nd February - The big swan plant that Mrs Ryan and the junior school have been looking after since the beginning of the Term has no leaves left on it for the caterpillars to eat. So Mrs Saker brought two hungry caterpillars over to Room 5's swan plant to eat some more juicy leaves!
Day 3 - Thursday 23rd February - One of our hungry caterpillars is getting ready to turn itself into a chrysalis. The other one is still munching away on the leaves.
Day 4 - Friday 24th February - When we arrived at school this morning we found that the caterpillar had turned itself into a chrysalis overnight. The other caterpillar had started to munch away on the leaf holding the chrysalis!
Day 7 - Monday 27th February - This morning we discovered that over the weekend our second caterpillar had been munching away again at the leaf the chrysalis was on. It was now making itself ready to turn into a chrysalis too...
During lunch time, Mrs Saker was lucky enough to notice the caterpillar turning itself into a chrysalis. First of all, its skin split...
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Then it started to twist and turn around on itself - the children in Room 5 said it looked like it was 'dancing'...
Finally it stopped moving. It had turned into a chrysalis.
We arrived at school to find that our first chrysalis had hatched into a beautiful monarch butterfly!
Day 44 - Wednesday 4th April
So far this Term we have had two butterflies hatch in our classroom and we have three chrysalis on our Swan Plant.
We will now plant the Swan Plant in the butterfly garden so that if the chrysalis hatch in the holidays, the butterflies will have some food and a place to rest.
Brilliant photos of the caterpillar turning into a chrysalis - I didn't know it worked that way!
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