Since I have posted the challenge called Outside the Box, I have decided to add another great project to our study. If you don't know what this is regards to, please click the link above for more information on the challenge.

In addition to our standard science curriculum, I am adding two important projects. Since both kids are all ready learning a bit about insects and crustaceans, I thought it would be great to bring in a few things for a unit study.

We have purchased the Painted Lady Butterfly Kit from Carolina Biological Supply. The kit comes complete with everything we need to raise ten live caterpillars and watch them turn into butterflies. We added the Mallow Plant so that if the adult butterflies need a natural diet, they can eat it and they can also lay eggs on it to start the process all over again. In addition to this, we have used Enchanted Learning.com's print outs on the anatomy of a Painted Lady Butterfly, and a whole lot more! We will have a few weeks worth of learning on this.

Next biology project is crustaceans, this is a project I found harder to get the supplies for. Although we are getting the hermit crabs from Carolina's Biological Supply, I felt we needed a better set-up than what they offered in their kit. We will be ordering the set of three land hermit crabs one the tanks and supplies are in. Next I went to Glass Cages.com and ordered a 1/2-15 acrylic tank with lid. A 1/2-15 means it is a fifteen gallon tank only 1/2 the height! So this is perfect for a few hermit crabs. After that, I went to The Crabbage Patch for all the hermit supply needs! We ordered extra shells, the calcium, the sand, the dishes, everything they need and then some! We are also using print-outs from Enchanted Learning.com. If you have elementary children, you could really benefit from having a membership with Enchanted Learning, it is only $20 a year and the amount of things they have to offer is fabulous!

For my fellow homeschooling mom's, please understand that if you decide to take on a project like this- do your research! Not all of these projects are for everyone. For instance- we looked at raising Praying Mantis. However, one egg case can have as many as 50-150 (sometimes even more) babies hatch from that. The problem is that every live mantis baby that hatches, needs to be placed in its own vial. Keeping more than 1 baby per vial leads to one eating the other. The Mantis grows fairly large, you would need at least a 5-10 gallon tank per one adult mantis. If you house anymore than one mantis per tank, dominance sets in, until only one survives. This could be extremely costly to those who would not want to see the other mantis babies killed.

Another problem with say raising frogs or salamanders, usually you would need to keep them as pets for life as they can not be released into the wild. There are laws about that. Check with your state's wildlife department to make sure you know what the law's are before releasing anything you raise.

For us, we looked at many different things and we decided on the Painted Lady Butterflies and the hermit crabs because each one is unique and we will learn lots from raising them. The butterflies life cycle is very short, we are not guaranteed for them to reproduce, but it will be a learning experience all in itself. The hermit crabs will teach us about molting, proper handling, different anatomy and much more. They have a very long life cycle, and again, it will be a learning experience like no other.

As our projects get started, I will post images of them, the set-ups, and give updates as well. Keep checking back, this is guaranteed to be one awesome adventure for the kids!