Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 22

We're skipping ahead a bit on the Outdoor Hour Challenges from the Handbook of Nature Study blog, partly because I wanted to spend the whole term focussing on Insects and other Invertebrates rather than trying to finish Garden Flowers.

The first challenge in this series was to do with Butterflies, which is a great place to start. After talking a little about the different stages of life a butterfly goes through (egg, larva/caterpillar, pupa/chrysalis and then adult butterfly) we headed out to the park to look primarily for butterflies but also for any other insects we might come across.

We saw three types of butterflies, took pictures and then tried to work out what they were when we got home.

This one we decided was a Small Copper

This one looks like a Small White

This one we think was a Common Blue. It looked really blue when it was flying about, but it was hard to get a photo to show that. When it was at rest on a leaf we could only see the underside of its wings. Still, they were quite pretty too.

Eventually we got a photo with its wings spread out.

When we got home, Sophie also copied out a picture of a butterfly and labelled all the different parts of its body to put in our nature diary.

Below is one of the photos I took this summer when we were on holiday in Luxembourg. We spent the afternoon at a butterfly garden. It was a magical place! As soon as you walked in there were giant butterflies, all different colours and species, flying about all around you. The children loved it, and still talk about it.

Some of the butterflies were huge - you can tell by the size of the orange slices on the plate.

We learnt lots about the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was amazing to see all the different chrysalises that had been collected and hung up in the incubator by the staff team.

Back to our nature walk last week, whilst we were in the park we came across a few ants and bugs, including this interesting brown beetle, which Charis found. We popped it into our bug jar and took it home to draw it and identify it, but we couldn't work out what it was. We wondered if it might be some kind of Chafer, but it wasn't at all hairy. Answers on a postcard please!

Abide in Him!