The Power of Good Questions...
How exactly will that caterpillar change into the butterfly?
Walking past Ms. Armstrong's 1st-grade class, even an oft-oblivious hallwanderer can't miss the large white screened enclosure front-and-center of the classroom. Inside that enclosure, about 5 monarch caterpillars seem to be rather contentedly chomping their way through the milkweed leaves strewn about.
"But look!" one of the students exclaims to the visiting hallwanderer, "one is getting ready to made its chrysalis!"
"I wonder how much power it takes to hang on upside down like that," another asks.
"And why does it curl up at the bottom like a 'J'?"
"How does it change into the butterfly while it's inside that chrysalis?" asked a fourth.
What amazing questions! As they talked, some hypothesized about possible answers to some of these questions, based on things they had observed in the past; conversations followed about what we might be able to look for or observe or measure along the way to help us move closer to understanding the answers to those questions.
For so many of us, the miracle of metamorphosis is a process and phenomenon we have long taken for granted. But as this classroom of inquiring and observant 1st graders can teach us, investing the thought and applying the curiosity to ask good questions about an everyday process opens to us all a panoply of astounding possibility. The lighting of a fire, indeed.