Our Butterfly Eggs Hatched!

We are investigating the “Butterfly Life Cycle” and one of my students brought a lots of caterpillars. It was wonderful to see so many of them but they ate all the leaves very quickly so I asked my student to bring more leaves, which he did.

When I was holding the leaves I saw some little yellow dots on it and I realized they were butterfly eggs.

I was thrilled. And of course the children wanted to see and hold the leaf. The picture below gives you an idea of how small the eggs are.

 I took some pictures of the leaf. I showed the leaf with the eggs and the amplified picture on my camera viewfinder to the students. 

We had all seen and read many books about the life cycle of a butterfly and when I showed the ‘real eggs’ some of the students were really surprised. ‘They are soooo small’, they said.

On the next day one of the students looked at the leaf with the eggs and said, “The caterpillars are here!” I though he was daydreaming but to my surprise there were, tiny, really tiny caterpillars on the leaf. Some were still eating the eggshell as they do as soon as they get out of the eggs. It was an amazing experience. Again I took more pictures of the egg with the tiny caterpillars and showed to the students.

My pictures are not as sharp as the ones from the books.  I need another job to buy the camera and lenses needed to get into macro photography and take pictures similar to the ones in the books, but we can still see quite well the caterpillars and the eggs.

I placed the leaves on a tray with a couple of magnifying lenses for the students to observe as much as they wanted.

What an unexpected bonus for our investigation.

From this whole experience we decided to do a butterfly life cycle artwork, which I will post later.

Amelia Mello, M.Ed.