Life cycle of frogs and Mealworms - A Unit and some great videos! :)

Hi everyone!!!
I am back with some more news and pictures!! I would like to share with you my part II of life cycles. We had such a great time with my students when we learned about life cycles during our Science period. Last post was about butterflies and ladybugs (click HERE to see the last post), I would like to share with you about meal worms and frogs this time.

The best of meal worms is that is so new to them and they have never seen them before (they had more experience with butterflies or frogs). I am telling you all, they are so gross! and yet so cool!! :) My students couldn't stop looking at them and just observe them!
Here are some pictures I was able to take for the first days:

What I also like about this life cycle is that it's very simple to maintain them. Meal worms just eat decomposing fruit and we left some oats in there for them to keep on eating. They don't drink water because they get all the water from the fruit. 

I also found very cool videos on how these meal-worm "molt" (shed); they do shed several times during the larva stage. Now, I'll be honest with you, they are kind of gross, but they are so cool at the same time. My students were so amazed by just looking at these videos, that I was able to just keep on looking... lol Here are the you tube videos I was able to find:

These are some pictures of our mealworms that have already turned into pupae! We did not get to see the action, but we sure could see the skin out and those white-alien looking friends! My students are so excited about them that the first thing they do when they come in is to observe them!

These are the skin that we found all around them. I pull them out so students could see them better.

The pupae are all over, but I circled some of them so you could have a better view of it :)

This mealworm had just turned into a pupa, it really does look like a white alien!

you could still see the skin near by...

As soon as I walked into my classroom and went to check our friends, this is the one I found (purple circle). Apparently he had already turned into a beetle over the weekend because he was already getting the darken color. The other friends had already the legs turned darker, that meant they were ready to turned into a beetle as well :)

On this picture, you can see more of the pupae that had already the legs turned a little bit darker... some others are still on their "resting" stage...

Sadly, we were not able to see any pupae in action... but we were able to see the first stage of the beetle. That means, the beetle is out but with a white/cream color (blue circle)

By the end of the week, we had more friends! but they all liked to be under the oats!! Only two (purple circle) were brave enough to come out! Maybe it's because beetles are nocturnal and they were all trying to sleep while we were having class!! ;)

These were the last pictures I took of the beetles. As you can see most of them (if not all) have already that brown dark or black color. They were ready to be released. We had such a great time with these buddies!

Lastly, we learned about the life cycle of a frog. This is our friend "Froggy." I taught the lesson, but I didn't get to see Froggy grow. By the time we got him (after our meal worms), I was leaving for maternity leave back then. So this is the only picture I got of it.

We made foldables for both meal worms and frogs. My students took notes of each cycle as we were talking about them at the carpet and fill out their own foldable :)

Before I let you go, I would like to share with you my unit :) The foldables shown above are are part of this unit :)
This unit come in English and Spanish. If you would like to have more info on what comes in it, click on ENGLISH or SPANISH to take you to each product :) Here is a preview of what the unit contains. 

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog today. I hope you have a great weekend, make it a restful and relaxing! Have a blessing week, and stay tuned!! :)