More Butterflies

4/18/08 Friday (9:30 p.m.)
The big ones are between 5/8 and 3/4 of an inch, but the little one is only exactly a half of an inch.

They have grown a lot in 12 hours!

4/22/08 Tuesday
They are huge. There are lots and lots of webs on the outside now.

They are huge! They are about 1-1/2" all stretched out.

4/25/08 Friday
They are 1-3/4". And on is hanging. And others aren't hanging, but they are flat at the top of the bottle.

Wow, and their webs — one went all the way to the top of the bottle!

Their food is messed up now, but I think they've all had enough for when they pupate.

Their heads are hanging down and they're trying to put their heads to each other. Now one is crawling down.

They have greenish sides like a string woven in them. And one tried to eat the web that they made.

They're just doing a lot of amazing stuff.

4/26/08 Saturday, 7:40 a.m.
Two of them have spun chrysalises, and all the others are down, but they don't have chrysalis.

5/6/08 Tuesday, 3:29 p.m.
Two butterflies have hatched. We gave them a slice of orange because they'll suck the juice out of of it with their proboscis.

The ones that have hatched, their chrysalises are empty now and they look pink.

I have caterpillars!

Thursday morning
I have caterpillars! They will turn into butterflies.

There are six. At least three will stay alive. And three might die.

They are really really tiny black caterpillars.

Friday morning
They have shedded some skin now and there's a lot more balls of food so they've been eating really good.

The webbing has gotten shorter and there's a little bit of shedded skin in the webbing. There's a little bit of webbing on the other side, too.

They're all a little big longer or a little bit shorter than a half of an inch.

Friday night
The big ones are between 5/8 and 3/4 of an inch, but the little one is only exactly a half of an inch.

They have grown a lot in 12 hours!

We completed a unit about butterflies and moths and now we're raising a batch of six Painted Lady caterpillars. We ordered this kit and they were shipped to us from Carolina Biological Supply Company. Addy had fun tracking their FedEx delivery route on Google Earth from North Carolina to Ohio to our house with stops in between. Unfortunately our camera is broken so we can't track their growth with photos yet.

Sonlight catalog

Two pictures of Addy appear in the 2008 catalog of our curriculum provider, Sonlight. She wants you all to see them.


Caption:
Five-year-old Addy B of Reed City, MI, does Singapore Math with her dolls and shoes. “Sonlight’s Singapore Math really works for us,” writes Addy’s mom Sue. “Addy has started to demonstrate number concepts in her head that apply to everyday living. “Earlybird Math 2B gives a gentle introduction to the concept of subtraction with an example of children removing their shoes. To make the concept more visual, we grabbed some of Addy’s dolls and shoes to practice.” For Addy’s first year of Sonlight, she’s using Core K with all the electives.

Caption:
“After reading the story of baby Moses in Sonlight’s Egermeier’s Bible Story Book, my five-year-old daughter Addy wanted to make a basket just as Moses’ mother did,” writes Sue B of Reed City, MI. “I like that Sonlight does the planning work for me so we can spend time using our creativity to fi gure out fun ways to extend our learning. Every morning after breakfast, I open my blue Sonlight binder and know that the day’s lessons are planned out for me. It allows me to concentrate on the children rather than lesson planning.” Addy has studied all Sonlight’s K programs in her first year with Sonlight.

Dairy Foods: Barn to Cow to Table

This is my barn poster. I made a pie chart and two kinds of bar graphs. I also took pictures of cows.

Thank you for answering my question about what is your favorite dairy food.

From Mom: What a farm girl. This hat was my door prize at the county corn growers' banquet. I gave it to Addy and she has been wearing it ever since.

We used this opportunity to learn about math and Addy entered her poster in the American Statistical Association's annual competition for children in grades K-3. She was given the opportunity to choose any topic and her choice was: cows.

Spinning eggs

This is me spinning eggs for an experiment. The experiment is that I have to spin the eggs and figure out which two eggs have been cooked and which one didn't get cooked — which two are the hard-boiled eggs.

I figured it out by spinning the eggs and I had to put my hand on it and take it off right away. And if it kept spinning, it wasn't hard-boiled. If it stopped spinning, then it was hard-boiled.

Because the hard-boiled eggs were cooked, so the shell inside wouldn't spin around.

Mom's note: The white and yolk wouldn't continue to spin in the cooked egg.

Spices

From Mom: Addy didn't feel like writing, but she learned about the explorers tasted the spices that they travelled the world to find. The cinnamon in her mouth is bark that Liz and Marc brought back from their first trip to Thailand.

My picture of a duck

I made this picture of a duck for a contest. It was very very fun, although getting the outline of the duck was a lot of work. Once I got to put the colors in it was getting funner and funner and funner. After I got the duck all drew in I drew water around it and the trees, little island. That's what I did.

This is a mallard boy duck.

Addy entered the Junior Duck Stamp contest, which we heard about when checking into good places for nature walks in our new area. It is put on by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Children learn about conservation, then create a portrait of a North American duck, goose or swan. We use the Usbourne "First Book of Nature" as part of our science learning and happened to be reading from the section about birds anyway, so it was a nice tie-in.

Earlier this winter we had twice tried to see the wildlife artist Michael Glenn Monroe at a book signing in Big Rapids, but his visits were postponed both times (once he was commissioned to create ornaments for the White House and went to meet President and Laura Bush as if that is somehow more important than going to Big Rapids, and the second time a snowstorm kept him away). Addy had been looking forward to it, so we found a signed copy of his "The Wonders of Nature Sketchbook: Learn About Nature and How to Draw It" at a local bookstore. In the book he demonstrates how to put together simple shapes to create animals, including a duck. She practiced his method to make her duck, then used bird books to figure out how to color the mallard.

Addy titled her work "Nature Picture of Boy Mallard." Students are encouraged to write a conservation message to submit along with their picture. She wrote, "Take care of the earth, and take care of the things in it and around it."