Posted on: June 27th 2013
On Thursday 20th June, the Reception children had a wonderful time at Butterfly World.
They started their day imagining that they were tiny insects, as they explored an oversized garden which they entered through a crack in a giant flowerpot. Armed with activity sheets and a sense of adventure, they scurried around the garden spotting enormous matchboxes that they could have climbed into, spiders with legs as long as a table’s and a garden fork that was over a storey high.
Back to human size, they wound their way through a series of fantastical gardens with walls studded with discarded kitchen implements, musical instruments and headless Action Men. They discovered gardens inspired by Narnia and Wonderland and strolled round a chrysalis shaped lake surrounded by beautiful wild flowers, which were attracting a lot of insect activity.
In the butterfly house, children discovered caterpillar eggs, observed delicate lace wing butterflies and imposing owl butterflies feeding on oranges, flying all around them and even landing on them. Some of the children thought that the owl butterflies, with their striking owl eye markings were rather creepy.
The children were very keen to handle great, woody stick insects and giant cockroaches in the activity centre. There they learned more about the life cycle of the butterfly and could see shelves of hanging chrysales at different stages - some with butterflies emerging. Very exciting.
The Reception children really impressed their guide at Butterfly World with their extensive knowledge of leaf cutter ants. They are all experts in leaf cutter behaviour as they have been acting out the activities of the leaf cutter colony in their topic lessons - laying thousands of eggs, cutting the leaves to feed the fungus that they live on and protecting their workers from bug attacks!
It was a wonderful day. And the children all came home with a buggy goody bag.
