We had such a great science afternoon that I am writing a quick second blog so you can see and talk with your kids tonight about the cool things that happened.

Outside, Owen found a huge preying mantis. The preying mantis allowed me to hold him for just a minute and then we examined him for quite awhile on a bucket. In the picture, I’d like to believe that he was surrendering to his admirers, but it’s more likely he was saying “Back Off!”.

Now we have to wonder if the preying mantis is one of our babies from the “Preying Mantis Fiasco” of 2009. We had gotten a sac of preying mantis eggs in fall 2008. The egg sac lived in science room in a jar until late May 2009 when I needed the jar for another science find. Thinking the egg sac was a dud, I put him on the kitchen window sill. However, if I had done my research about this, I would have know that the preying mantis hatches in early June. Alas, one morning Melinda opened WF with around 300 preying mantis babies running around the kitchen! Of course, we captured and released them into our garden and sent around 150 back to the farm.

A little later, the we closely examined the WWF Monarch Butterfly that hatched earlier in the day.

Inside a few other cool things took place this afternoon:

Our WF Monarch chrysalis was moving back and forth on its own. It is clearly ready to hatch.

We took grapes off their stems in anticipation of making juice with them. Thank you Nickersons for the grapes and idea. (Would anyone really mind if we tried our hands at wine…just a thought:)

We had our regular snack, but I wanted to see how the kids felt about pumpkin smoothies and whether it would merit being a WF snack food. And I really wanted a pumpkin smoothie for myself! So I whipped up a batch and we did a taste test. Overwhelmingly, the children said they loved them. Kathy, Annie’s mom, asked that I post the recipe:

Pumpkin Smoothie Recipe

1 c pure pumpkin

2 frozen bananas

1 c stonyfield organic french vanilla

1 1/2 ice cubes

1/2 tsp or so of allspice

and some sweetener to taste: for kids I use honey or pure maple syrup, for me I use some splenda because I’m sensative to sugar.

Fun day to be a WF teacher!

Have a wonderful evening,

Tami