Silkworm Kinder Activity
One year an industrious kinder teacher brought silkworm eggs to kinder, it is now a regular exercise for the 4 year old kinder kids to watch the full life span of the silk worms. Silkworms start life as eggs. It takes from 6-20 days for eggs to hatch.

Over the next month they eat mulberry leaves voraciously and quickly grow into smooth, creamy white caterpillars This is called the lava stage.

The worms grow to about seventy times their original size and shed their skin four times. This is called moulting.

When the silkworm matures (about 26 days after hatching) it spins a soft, soft, creamy white cocoon around itself in loops for protection when it is sleeping.It takes about three days to fully spin a cocoon and turn it into a pupa.

The silkworm sleeps for about 21 days in the pupa, the stage between caterpillar and moth. Then it emerges from the pupa as a slimy moth with six jointed legs, two pairs of wings and two feathery feelers. When the wings have expanded and dried the moth is a pearly white colour.

The silk moth can’t fly because its body is too heavy. So it flutters around till it finds another moth of the opposite sex. They then mate: the female lays sticky, pale yellow eggs – up to 500 tiny eggs in neat rows.