Butterflies And The Start of Our Writing Project

When I arrived at school yesterday, I was greeted by butterflies!!  About half of our 30 chrysalis hatched over the weekend.  By the end of the day, we had 24 or so butterflies and 6 left to hatch.  Currently, we have 3 that we are waiting on.  It is amazing that something the size of an eyelash can grow and change into something as beautiful as a butterfly.  One of my students even saw one of the butterflies hatch!  I will admit, I was jealous of this.  This student waited to tell anyone until after it happened and I was standing right there, we did get to see a newly hatched butterfly.  I was lucky enough to see one hatch while my students were in P.E. I wanted to try and record it or get pictures of it but it was too fast.  Today, one of my students noticed that one of our butterflies has only one antennae.  It is very strange, it does not seem to move very much, it was in the same general area of the habitat all day.  I've tried taking a picture of it but the netting gets in the way.  We have had fun learning and watching our caterpillars transform over the past 3 weeks.  It will be a sad day when we release them later this week, hoping that these rain clouds go away and the temperature gets a little warmer by Friday.

This is what our caterpillars looked like when they first arrived.

This is how big the caterpillars were after only 2 days!

Waiting for our butterflies!

Butterflies!!

We started writing our reports for our big LDC project on Citizenship and how it affects our community.  This has taken a lot of time.  I am trying to get my students not to write sentences using the words "I" or "my".  This has been a challenge.  Most of my students are still working on writing their introduction.  For this, I am trying to have them write a sentence on either good citizenship or bad citizenship and what it does to the community.  Here is a sentence that one of my students wrote "Good citizenship makes the world a better place."  This is a great opening sentence! Sadly we get stuck after this sentence, they want to start using "I' or "my" or they are writing examples.  The next sentence is suppose to have 3 of the citizenship words that we have been learning about.  The last sentence in the paragraph is to get the reader ready for our report.  I have been doing a lot of editing and conferencing with my students.  I want them to do a good job on their report and I feel like I have to give them a lot of time and attention so that they are doing their best work.  I do have a few students that have finished their introduction and are starting to write the rest of their report.  They are currently writing a paragraph, at least 3 sentences, for each of the 3 citizenship words that they included in their introduction.  I'm hoping that tomorrow will be the last day for writing our introduction paragraphs.  I should have some pictures of our reports to share by the end of the week.  This is going to be a long process but will be worth it when we are able to share our end result.  If anyone has ever tried to teach elementary students how to write a report, I would love to hear what you have done.

Amber