Silkworms, Day 1

Mommy guest-writing:

Yesterday the silkworms hatched. What were poppy seed-sized black eggs split open to release tiny, 1/8th inch black caterpillars that quickly started crawling around the petri dish looking for food. We made silkworm chow and are now feeding them little crumbs of greenish stuff the consistency of agar. LF will be measuring them every day & taking pictures to upload here.

For information on how to rear silkworms, these are good resources:

• http://insected.arizona.edu/silkrear.htm.
  
• http://suekayton.com/Silkworms/raising.htm.

We bought our eggs & silkworm chow from here: Niles Biological.

To summarize:
Day #1: 1/8"

Silkworm Project

We received our silkworm eggs today!!! We got 25 eggs. They came in a petri dish, and we put the petri dish under a dark bowl and put a moist paper towel next to it and left the bowl lifted up a bit, and put the whole thing next to a window. The moist paper towel is to keep it moist so the eggs don't dry up.

The eggs look like tiny little black things that are blackish/grayish. They kind of look like tiny miniscule seeds.

The solar system

Millions and millions and millions of years ago the Earth formed. The yolk of the Earth is melted metal. I mean, iron. And the part closing around the yolk is hard rock, and above that is some more rock and above that was rock. And it was all volcanoes and meteors. This is when the Earth was formed. The volcanoes turned into water and it rained and rained for years, forming the seas. and that's how our planet was formed.

Our solar system is the Milky Way, because it looks so milky. The Milky Way is a bunch of stars. There was an explosion that formed the Earth like I just talked about. It was the Big Bang. And Sol is, well I believe that Sol is the god of all the planets. And just to let you know Sol is the name of the sun.

And that's all I say about for now. From me.

My teachers

I have been having a good time at school with Mommy. Mommy is my new teacher and Daddy is my science teacher. Mommy has been a very good teacher but Daddy has been teaching me barely any science. So mommy has been becoming my science and regular teacher. That's mostly what's been going on the past few days. That's all I'm going to write about in my blog today. Maybe I'll write some more later today, or some other time. Bye, from me and the blog.

Paleontology

I would like to be a paleontologist because I like dinosaurs. They are big and funny and nice. Paleontologists are the best experts on finding dinosaur bones. They sketch it and take pictures of it so they know how it fits together. Fossils give good clues to how it was in the old days. They can learn how the dinosaurs walk from footprints. They can learn if they walk like this [walks with feet together] or like this [walks with feet spread apart]. They can learn if dinosaurs lived together in a group or as one single. They can learn what dinosaurs eat from their droppings and many other things.

Nature Study: Daddy Longlegs

Daddy longlegs eat a lot of stuff. They eat tons of bugs, kind of just like frogs, bread and butter. And some of them have small bodies with long legs and others have big bodies with shorter legs and the small body ones are the males.

The shape of spider bodies are very different because spiders have two parts, and daddy longlegs have one part. Spiders have eight eyes and daddy longlegs have two eyes.

Daddy longlegs' legs can come out very easily. And if you look at one carefully, you'll see little spots of white on its legs. I don't know what it is but I think it's just a part of them.

I think Daddy longlegs are kind of cute and good for pets. If you have pets that don't bite and are animals and you can feed them human food, you can keep them as pets. Some of them have 13 legs, others have 12. This one has eight legs. And it's a boy. I'm not going to keep it as a pet because it will want to go back to its wife, if it has a wife, and babies.