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Silkworm Unit

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my full disclosure policy.

Have you ever tried to breed your own silkworms? After raising the two butterflies from the chrysalis stage, we decided to try raising silkworms. This was a lot harder and more work, especially making sure they were always fed. I also created a silkworm unit and a silkworm printable pack for preschoolers and kindergarteners that can be used to learn about silkworms or to go alongside raising silkworms.


This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

Silkworm Unit

 
Materials Needed
    • white paper
    • printer
    • laminator
    • colouring pencils
    • scissors
    • lead pencils
    • eraser
    • binder ring
    • Books about silkworms

This silkworm unit contains 78-pages and is aimed at children in grades one through four. It requires research to answer the questions.

 

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

This pack includes:

  • flashcards
  • silkworm eggs worksheet
  • silkworm worksheet
  • silkworm and moth observations pages
  • silkworm worksheets
  • silkworm anatomy worksheet

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

  • silkworm life cycle flashcards and posters
  • silk work sheets
  • silkworm graphing
  • silkworm life cycle book
  • word search
  • sikworm dictionary

as well as answer pages

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

To download you copy, click the link below:

*** Silkworm Unit ***

There is also a printable pack for preschoolers and kndergarteners. Click on the link below to download it:

*** Silkworm Tot to Prep Pack ***

To start raising your own silkworms, you need silkworm eggs as well as mulberry leaves or silkworm chow as well as an enclosure to keep them in. I ordered around 100 silkworm ends. When they arrived there were a mixture of white (infertile) and black (fertile) eggs on a piece of cardboard.

We placed these eggs into our enclosure and waited for them to start hatching.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

It took around 7 to 20 days for these eggs to start hatching. Once they hatched, they just ate and ate and ate. This meant that they also grew very, very quickly.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

We cleaned out their ‘house’ everyday and fed them three times a day. This is why we went onto the chow, as we were finding it hard to keep up with the leaves.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

Below is a picture of a silkworm eating. The boys found out that if you were quiet and put your ear close to them, you could hear them munching on the leaf. It sounded like soft rain! This was very fascinating to hear, especially when there was lots of these little creatures all munching together.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

The silkworms kept eating and growing, so we decided to try and measure them. They didn’t like to sit still very long, so it was a little hard to measure them. This was the size of a majority of the silkworms ~ 5 cm long.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

Silkworms shed their skin 4 times during their lives. We didn’t see much of this happening, though we did find the shed skins in the enclosure when we were cleaning it out. We were able to capture this silkworm below shedding its skin, though the quality of the picture isn’t that great as it was sitting inside a toilet roll.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

Once they had shed and reached around 4 to 6.5 cm long, they were ready to start spinning their cocoons. We placed the toilet rolls into the enclosure as we had been told that this would give them something to build their cocoons in.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

We cut out toilet rolls in half to make them a little smaller and give us more ‘houses’ for the silkworms to build their cocoons in.

See the dirty patch at the front of the toilet roll in the photo on the above? The silkworms empty themselves before building their cocoons.

What was really surprising to the boys was that the silkworms don’t eat again once they start their cocoons, as the white moths don’t eat, drink or fly.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

This silkworm decided he preferred to build his cocoon in a leaf instead of a toilet roll. This was our first complete cocoon and the first moth to hatch.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

Some of our silkworms built their cocoons on top of each other. With many of the toilet rolls having 2-4 cocoons in them!

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

Pretty soon we had tons of cocoons or silkworms spinning cocoons. This was when the feeding slowed down to almost nothing, which also helped slow down the cleaning of the enclosure.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

After a few weeks, the cocoons started hatching and the moths starting to emerge. This was the first time we had seen a white moth.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

When they first emerge, they sit on their cocoon and unwrinkled their wings and get the blood flowing.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

Then they mate for up to 24 hours.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

This is followed by the female laying her eggs. Though these white moths looked really soft and furry, the poor creatures only last a few days before they die. This gives them just enough time to mate and lay the eggs.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

At first the eggs are a lemon-yellow colour. At this time, you can store them in the fridge and then take them out when again when you want them to hatch. We let a few hatch just so we could see the whole process again.

This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.

This whole process took us a couple of months to complete. It was quite exhausting at the start, feeding the silkworms multiple times a day and keeping their enclosure clean. Though, we have enjoyed looking after the silkworms and watching them grow.  I’m not sure how much longer we are going to keep them, but we now have loads and loads of eggs.
 
As part of our study we also completed some silkworm activities. We made a silkworm book. For this I purchased a cheap photo book. I cut out cardboard the size of photos for the writing pages and we printed out photos that we had taken during the life cycle process for the other pages.
 
This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.
 
The boys also made a silkworm life cycle mat.
 
This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.
 
For these, we cut the green circles out of cardboard, then they painted on yellow dots of the eggs, we used a cotton bud which we chopped the end off and drew on black lines for the segments of the silkworm’s body. For the cocoon, they rolled up a cotton ball and for the moth, we cut out a circle from white felt and used a white pipe cleaner to tie it together.
 
This Silkworm unit is a great way to learn about silkworms and goes great alongside rising your own silkworms.
 
They also painted a white moth and used glitter to make the wings shimmer. We used a cutout shape of a butterfly to complete this.
 
We enjoyed our time learning about the silkworm life cycle. 
 

Have you ever tried to raise silkworms?

 
Here are some great links, many of which we used in our studies:

A great link that goes into lots of details about the lifecycle of silkworms can be found here.

Learn all about the silk road here

A great site about the silk the silkworms spin: Here

Great activities and information about silkworms can be found here.

A great website with loads of information and activities about silkworms: click here.

A post about silkworms: here

For some silkworm facts look here.

A great page for kids all about silkworms: here

A fact sheet about silkworms: here

More about silkworms: here

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Category: Homeschooling, PrintablesTag: Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Kindergarten, Life Cycles, PreK, Preschool, Science, Unit Studies

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