StickBugs, Class Pets, and more!!!

Dear Mom and Dad…

This week we had SOOO many things to choose from for our Journal Letters home!  Mrs. Boekhout could have FILLED the board!  In the end, however, we had to choose just ONE event, so that we could practice our GOOD WRITING SKILLS by ZOOMING IN and ADDING DETAILS We want our parents to be able to VISUALIZE the scene.

Here are some of the exciting events our class chose to write about:

the class pets, the class hamster, calendar time, reading the next chapters in our novel  “Class Pets”, the new grass lizards, Clues & Questions by the Special Helper of the Day,  getting to hold the Walking Stick insects, the Terry Fox run, birds coming to our bird feeders.  Whew!

Mrs. Boekhout is going to choose the Walking Sticks for this blog because… WOW!  Everyone was SO excited when each table got a blackberry branch with 4 different species of Walking Sticks on it!  Stick Bugs are known as PhasmidsGhost Insects… because their camouflage lets them “disappear” into the branches and leaves. 

Our Indian Sticks do a neat trick… they fold 2 legs forward and 4 legs backwards, until you can’t see anything but a little green twig!  The Pink Wings have tiny, delicate wings and can flutter away when disturbed.  The Bacculum Sticks are our longest sticks.  They like to wave their 2 front legs in the air, just as if they were saying “hello”!  The Thorny Sticks could win an “ugly bug” award with their brown thorny bodies!  The males are much smaller than the females and you can often see them having a piggy back ride around the bug tank!  All of our Walking Stick insects live happily in one big tank, and they all eat Blackberry leaves.  Blackberries are actually an invasive species here (even though the berries are soooo yummy!), so Mrs. B. doesn’t mind chopping them off for “bug dinners”.

Walking Stick Welcome! on PhotoPeach

 

–> Watch our Walking Sticks Video here! <–

 



Hope you had an exciting week too!