News Lovejoy Elementary News Monarch Butterflies at Lovejoy ES
Monarch Butterflies at Lovejoy ES PDF Print E-mail
Written by Kristin Dawson   
Thursday, 10 December 2009 12:08
First grade students at Lovejoy Elementary recently participated in the annual migration of monarch butterflies as they made their long journey to Mexico for their winter rest. Mrs. James has a milkweed garden at home and collected more than 100 eggs to bring into the school to share with anyone who wanted to participate! All in all, kindergarten and first grade students, as well as a couple of students in third and fourth grade, raised and tagged more than 100 monarchs and released them. It was a labor of love and a great learning opportunity to watch them grow. They are beautiful creatures, indeed!
We thought that our annual fall "monarch playtime" was over when...
Last week we received an email from the Monarch Watch group, which needed a prompt response. Luckily, we were one of the first 20 people to respond to an urgent call for classrooms to participate in the Monarchs in Space program. Yes, Monarchs in Space!!!  All in all, they've had over 800 responses and they're still coming in!! It's lucky that one of our teachers was working late and happened to be in Groupwise at the time of their mailing!
To make a long story short, we will be participating as "Citizen Scientists" as the astronauts take monarch caterpillars into space next week! We will be overnighted a group of 6 caterpillars and a special rearing cage, similar to the rearing chamber onboard the space shuttle from the BioServe Space Technologies! We will have the same rearing conditions (minus the zero-gravity and g-force stuff!!)  and document and compare what's happening with the caterpillars who are traveling into space. How cool is that???!!!! Our very documentation will go down in history! We should be getting our specimen caterpillars in on Thursday or Friday, depending on their mailing time.
The kids are just finding out about it this week, as we have still been getting very early information from the Monarch Watch group. Admittedly, it's very much a work in progress for them! We will be introducing the whole thing to them on Wednesday morning, the 11th of November. Meanwhile, you can look at their link to get an idea of what's going on. We will be able to check in daily via live and still pictures as they come in from the space shuttle. If you ask me, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for our students to be direct participants in such a great program! We're soooooo excited!!
Here is the link. This is a place that you can check as a family for some fun conversations, especially after the shuttle takes off and the photos and other information start coming in after the 16th.
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