This morning, Clover woke up and immediately went to the calendar. She counted the days since we marked Bonnie's chrysalis-making day, and announced that we better take a picture of the cocoon because Bonnie would be making her appearance any day now.
I was really glad later this afternoon that I went ahead and took five minutes to get a somewhat good picture of Bonnie's home. She's been hanging around in there for eleven days now, and I could have taken it earlier. It just looked kind of like a dead brown leaf hanging by a thread to a stick. Not exactly photo-worthy. But...now it is amazing to look at that and think about what happened in that dried-up looking little thing.
We started on our last block of the school year this week - a one week long block about butterflies! I thought that it would be fun to end the year with something slightly more tame than the Battle of Ragnarok. That was fun and exciting, but Clover was a tiny bit sad to be done with Norse Mythology. I thought that maybe a butterfly block would be a fun way to end the year.
Today we learned a butterfly verse and a new song. I told a story all about how Bonnie started her journey as an egg, grew up to be a caterpillar, was found in the garden of some children, wound up eating carrot tops in a mason jar, and spinning her cocoon. I stopped the story there. Willow and Nova helped with coloring a big green leaf. Clover cut out some white caterpillar eggs and glued them onto the leaf. She wrote some words to go with the picture.
After lesson time, we came up to the kitchen for lunch. We ate and cleaned up, had some play time. And then... Clover went to the play room to get Charlotte, and Bonnie had emerged from her cocoon!!!! She was a shriveled up blackish-blue thing clinging to the wax paper on top of her jar........
The kids watched......
and watched.......
and watched.....
......as her wings began to dry and she began to stretch out a little bit.
Eventually, we took her outside and took the lid off of her jar. It took a really long time for her to climb out.
Luckily, Clover was there to capture her emergence from the jar because I had moved on to swinging Nova. And she only stayed for a brief moment, stretching her wings, before taking flight.
She flew over to our grape vines, stopped and rested for awhile on a big green leaf, and then flew on...
We were all *so* excited!! We clapped and cheered as she glided over the blackberry field! Goodbye Bonnie! Good luck!!!!!!
Clover examined the empty cocoon a little more closely after Bonnie was gone.
I always know that lesson time has been a success when the kids act out their main lesson story:
~hanging from imaginary sticks in their imaginary cocoons by their silken girdles (yes, that's real butterfly terminology - silken girdle)~
~freshly emerged from cocoons and hanging upside down to dry~
~flying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!~
I'm so lucky to have these magical people in my life. They teach me something new every single day.
