Butterflies at the park

Last year it was milipedes.  This year they got to watch their own larvae turn into caterpillars and then butterflies.  Hunter has been looking forward to this all year long.  Mrs. Painter's class has been such a good source of Science for him.  They are always doing great experiments and exploring new things. I love her so much, I love the way she lets him thrive in his love for Science.  I got a really nice end of year email from her a couple of weeks ago.  In it she told me how much she has enjoyed Hunter and his constant zest for learning.  I may have teared up when she said that she had never seen a kid his age with such a love for the scientific process.  Then I may have laughed a little. 

She continued on saying that Hunter loves learning and is always trying to motivate the other kids to get excited about learning too.  That he is a leader and always brings so much enthusiasm into their classroom.  She ended by saying she looks forward to seeing what he ends up doing as he moves forward in life.  Well Mrs. Painter you aren't the only one who shakes their head smiling at this kid and wonders if that brain ever takes a five minute break from creating and inventing.  Oh my Hunter, there is just no one like you :) 

It was really neat to get the daily updates at home as to the stages of the butterflies.  Once they had all come out of their chrysalis the second grade classes all went over to the park to have a big releasing event.  First everyone brought a sack lunch and had a picnik.  Emma and I were surely not going to miss this fun so we headed over to join them.  It was a definite treat.  Mrs. Painter had them all sit in a circle and one at a time they reached in an let a butterfly land on their finger.  Emma LOVED this....

The neat thing was that since the butterflies have been in a small container, none of them really knew what to do and so they all just hung around for awhile and would just sit on the kids fingers and arms and open and close their wings. 

Watching classes of second graders all running around holding bright orange butterflies and having butterflies taking flight all around every few seconds was well....beautiful.  It was a really cool experience, nature is so amazing. 

You'd better believe that at the end of this day we had one happy scientist on our hands.