Our butterfly farm

Ellie is learning about butterflies at school and for two weeks now, she's brought home books from the school library about butterflies. The first book was a long narrative about the Monarch butterfly and its stages of life from an egg to an adult. She wanted Greg or me to read it to her every night.

The most recent book is more of an encyclopedia of butterflies and a reference of different types and where you would find them, what their caterpillars look like and what they eat, etc. etc. It's full of fun information, but it's not the kind of book you'd sit down and read cover to cover.

But this book has couple of pages devoted to explaining how to capture caterpillars, keep them in a jar, and watch them make their chrysalis and turn into butterflies. So Ellie and I decided we wanted to do that ourselves and today after school we are going to head out with a jar, a notebook to record what we find, and some tools for picking up caterpillars and placing them into our jar. Then we'll make sure our caterpillars are well fed and have a twig in the jar for them to hang their chrysalis. Then we will wait.

I'm still without a camera, but hopefully I will be able to take some pictures of this experiment and you can join us in watching the wonders of nature!