Silk Worms by mayakamina, on “Flickr” Creative Commons.

A teacher colleague asked when to expect silkworms, hoping to keep some in her classroom to study life cycles.

A bit of a wait. Not spring yet! Which reminded me: we have silkworms here annually for K-6 – one teacher collects the eggs and keeps some from year to year. Once, when I was teaching Stage 1, we came back from holidays for Term 4 and I never thought to check the old shoebox on the cupboard from the previous year. We’d had a few hot days in a row and, during a visiting student teachers’ maths lesson, a kid said, “Why are there full stops walking across the ceiling?”

Even the far wall was crawling with tiny black specks. We downed tools, went across he road to our oval and I sent every child running over the expanse of grass to get two mulberry leaves each. We returned to the classroom, stuffed the leaves into the box and the student teacher recommenced her lesson. By lunchtime, almost every little black speck had sniffed the leaves and had traversed the ceiling and back into the box.