Pre-Primary, like the rest of the school, has been raising monarch caterpillars. Almost all our monarchs are chrysalises now. This week we watched a short video on how monarch caterpillars hatch from egg as caterpillars, change into chrysalises and then butterflies, and how they migrate to Mexico for the winter. This year, there have been very few monarchs in Ohio, but we have spotted a few migrating past the school over the past few weeks.
Beginning late next week, our butterflies should start emerging. We’ll tag them and release them to join the migration.
We are also participating in Journey North’s Symbolic Migration. Each child in our class is making a paper butterfly. We’ll mail these paper butterflies to Mexico, where they will be looked after during the winter by the students at a Mexican school near the monarch sanctuaries. In the spring, butterflies will be mailed back to us. Online, we’ll get a chance to see the student who received our butterflies and send them a message.
In the STEM kindergarten studio, students did their very first experiment, testing whether monarch caterpillars could find their food in a simple maze. They built mazes and timed how long their caterpillars took to find the milkweed leaves. After analyzing the data, we decided that since most caterpillars did find their food, the hypothesis was correct!
