About Learning a Lesson I Already Knew . . .

We have monarch caterpillars in our classroom right now.  They are eating us out of milkweed on a very regular basis.  Earlier this year, a friend brought us Monarch chrysalises and we had the good pleasure of having them hatch in our classroom.  Now we are coming mostly full circle. . . we haven't had eggs, but that will be for another year.  So we are enjoying watching these little caterpillars eat and grow and poop at a seemingly tremendous rate.  If we are lucky, they will actually become butterflies the last week of school.  If not, I get the pleasure of taking them home.  Either way, it's super cool!  Thank you to Ilse, our butterfly connection!

On a simialar note, we have a terrarium with three local frogs and a mud turtle.  They need constant feeding and live insects are the menu.  (I did find that if you dangle a dead insect the frogs will go for it anyway so it's mostly a movement thing, not an issue of fresh meat.)  At any rate, my students often spend their recess time hunting for live bugs.  One student actually caught a monarch butterfly.  We decided it would be a good big meal and, in the spirit of food webs, we tossed it into the terrarium.  We watched one of the frogs jump at it, take a bite and spit it out.  I thought, "oh that's too bad, it was too big" and then I thought, wait a minute. . . monarchs are poisonous.  I have read that a hundred times.  They eat milkweed and somehow that makes them poisonous to other animals.  In fact, I remember that some butterflies fashion themselves after monarchs just to fool others into thinking they are poisonous.

What an amazing moment!  I have been teaching for years.  I believe in hands-on education.  I believe it makes kids smarter, but I had proof of it that day.  I knew monarchs were poisonous in the recesses of my mind . . . I'd read it many times.  But it really wasn't until I watched a frog spit out a monarch that I really knew it and I'm pretty sure I won't forget it.  We let the butterfly out of the terrarium and it flew to the window and we let it go free.  I think it is a wonder that an insect could teach me so much after all these years.   And I learned a lesson, again, that I already knew . . . kids need to experience learning and I need to keep teaching with that in mind.  Sometimes learning a lesson that you already know is an amazing gift!