Monarchs
In the summer of 2010, I had the opportunity to attend a
fabulous three-day PD session on bringing Monarch butterflies into the
classroom. Since then, every September we've brought in at least one
Monarch caterpillar and observed its metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis
to butterfly with the accompaniment of excited squeals from our students.
One summer they were so plentiful, my family actually raised over fifty of
these royal butterflies. Sadly this year
was different.
My sisters and I as well as our middle grades teacher Robert
went out on numerous occasions to hunt for caterpillars, to no avail.
Ironically, the only thing I brought home was a poison ivy rash!
Not to be daunted, I contacted one of the presenters from the
PD session, she forwarded my email to other teachers and one of them informed
me that she also couldn’t find any Monarch caterpillars, that a substitute was
available though.
Swallowtails
She said that swallowtail
caterpillars are easily found on dill, carrots, parsley and fennel. Before I had an opportunity to pay a visit to
our community vegetable garden, our ladies were working with parsley –
packaging it up to freeze for the winter.
My nephew Jakobi who had been at the cannery at the time, proudly came
home carefully carrying a sprig of parsley. “Elma, do you want this
caterpillar?” Did I ever?
A second one came to me similarly when my sister Shirley was
working in her herb garden where she also raises dill. Since then I’ve hunted through our vegetable
garden several times, wading through the carrot, parsley and dill patches, but
haven’t found any more. The pair of
caterpillars feasted on dill and parsley greens for several weeks before slipping
into their chrysalises just days before school started! I’ve brought them to school for the students
to observe, as it’s the first time any of us have seen this bumpy, brown
shell-like case. The down side of having
swallowtails as opposed to Monarchs is that we’ll have to wait until spring to
watch them emerge. Undoubtedly, we’ll
have to learn the virtue of patience from them throughout our long cold Manitoba
winter as they, diapause (an insect’s
version of hibernation) in our garden shed.
Since we don’t have live Monarchs, my back-to-school activity
this year was one I gleaned from that Monarch PD session. All our students, since coming back to school
have emerged into marvelous Monarchs.
Back-to-School Activity
Each student wrote a sentence on what they are “a-flutter”
(excited or nervous) about regarding coming back to school.
I’ve read them several books from my
butterfly collection as each class in our school came to my room to complete
their butterfly creation. My personal
favourite thus far is “A Butterfly is Patient” by Dianna Hutts Aston, a book
I’ve had in my classroom library for quite a while, but hadn’t taken the time
to read before. The information coupled
by its charming illustration held captive the attention of all my
listeners. What I especially
appreciated was that the inside of the front cover displayed dozens of caterpillar species along with their names. By the time we’d read our way through to the inside of the back cover, they had all emerged into beautiful butterflies that were also labeled! In fact, just looking at all the illustrations in this book and reading the labels gives readers much information on the appearance of both pupa and adult stages of dozens of different butterflies!
My hope is that like butterflies sipping on sweet nectar, so
too will our students enjoy studying science, social studies and all the other
subject and skills in all stages or grades to grow and emerge into knowledgeable
adults.Where have they gone?
Throughout the summer there didn’t seem to be a shortage of
Monarch butterflies around our flower gardens, which left us baffled as to why
we couldn’t find their eggs or caterpillars.
As well, milkweed was in abundance and I don’t think there’s a patch around
our colony from the railroad tracks to the south of us to the Assiniboine River
to the north that wasn’t inspected by eager caterpillar detectives.
Was anyone able to bring any caterpillars in this
summer? Do you grow any specific flowers
to attract them? If so, I’d love to hear from you.
