The tadpoles seem to have come to a standstill. My guess is that the cold spell we had put them into a dormant state. Hopefully, now that it's warm, they'll resume their path to frogdom. But, for now, they're still pretty much the same as when they hatched, perhaps a little bigger. Evan dumped half a can of fish food in the water and it got quite greenish. We changed the water yesterday and there seemed to be less tadpoles but only two dead ones. Did they eat their dead? I don't know. The water was too gross to see what was happening.
The caterpillars are doing amazing things! See this big guy in the picture? The one with his head stuck in the center of the cut-out leaf? He ATE that leaf section in about a minute. It was just like a little typewriter. He'd start on one side and eat around to the other side. Then, he'd go back to the begining side and start around again. It was very cool to watch. He finished the whole leaf in less than ten minutes! I can see why they might be labeled pests if you had a bunch of them eating the trees in your orchard!
Yesterday, the boys said they thought the caterpillars were building a new tent inside their new plastic home. But this morning, there were THREE cocoons in there. One of them even built a support structure to hold his cocoon upright in the corner of the tub. A tent would have been very cool but the cocoons are even more exciting.Ya know, with all this Science happening in our backyard, I wouldn't feel the least bit guilty dropping our Science book right now. But the boys are loving it. They ask to do Science every day and pour over a map of the solar system in their free time. This morning Ryan asked me if I could name the planets in order of the number of moons. Uh, no, I can't do that. But he did.. and even told me how many moons each one had. We're only on Lesson 2, The Sun, in Apologia Exploring Creation through Astronomy. There won't be anything left for them to learn by the time we get to the planet lessons. LOL
5 comments:
Who needs the lessons when they are learning it on their own?! sounds like a great schooling time!
I love the whole caterpillar thing. I can't wait until we start finding them in our yard!!
Mary,
Cool pictures!
Ain't God awesome? It's amazing how you get to see His handiwork in even the smallest of creatures.
:D
Keep having fun!
Seriously, you can come visit me anytime! Your boys would love the banana slugs that we were finding all over the redwoods. ;)
Now I was going to ask you something else. It so so important and unrelated to blogging that I was going to email you, but now I cannot remember. Hmmmm.... well, it's completely gone from this trap of a mind that I have. Too bad.
OH WAIT, I remember... soccer! I'm debating signing Cam up for our city's youth league soccer this weekend. You are like the ultimate soccer mom so I thought I'd ask you how you really feel about it. Would you do it again if you could go back? Would you postpone it? Does it "mesh" with homeschooling or are there weird interactions with the public school kids. That's one of the things I'm hesitant about is that the teams are divided up by school. For t-ball we ended up on a team on the complete other side of town because we weren't associated with a school as a point of reference. Dos he really *need* to start the first year he can? Ugh, I wish I would have heard about the sign ups this weekend sometime before yesterday! Too much to think about. Any brilliant insight?
science in the yard is awesome! and we love astronomy, it's so much fun to learn those things. :)
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