Caterpillar watch

Our schoolyard is a bit overrun with caterpillars. Cute, fat, fuzzy ones, the kind with 'eyes' all down their backs.

The kids are fascinated or repulsed, according to temperment (and gender, to my horror). Jada, who is perfect in every way, asked me if we could bring some in and keep them in a jar. What Jada wants, Jada gets, so we scooped up three of the fat little buggers and made them a ramshackle home in an old sour pickle jar.

After an hour or so, I snuck a peek and felt awful because it looked to me like they had all died. They wouldn't be the first critters to succumb to a bad case of too much ten-year-old lovin'. But what to tell the ten-year-olds?

I should have had more faith. Apparently the caterpillars hadn't died, they had just gone into some sort of temporary hibernation before spinning their cocoon. So cool! So now we have three fuzzy white cocoons living in our pickle jar. The kids check in on them almost hourly. No changes, but they keep looking. I pulled out the magnifying glasses so they could investigate more closely.

Tomorrow we'll read a short article on insect metamorphosis. If our school had a real library, I'd pull out all the books on butterflies and watch the kids dip into those. As it is, a couple of seductively-placed encylopedia articles will have to do...

I love "not teaching" science!