Life Cycle of a Butterfly using our HUE HD Pro Camera

This past month, my students have had the opportunity to watch the life cycle of a butterfly first hand.  Each year, my school purchases a Painted Lady butterfly kit for each kindergarten and preschool classroom in our school.  It's one of my absolute favorite parts of teaching kindergarten.   I love the excitement in the students' eyes as I open up the box and they see those tiny, wiggly little caterpillars.  I love that the life cycle of a butterfly mimics my sweet students' progress throughout their year in kindergarten.   They begin the school year tiny, wiggly and curious and morph into bigger, graceful and smarter children by the end of the year.

(Photo from Insectlore.com)

Those fidgety little caterpillars grow and grow and the students love to watch them.  Once they practice spinning silk, my students are enthralled.  After the caterpillars go up in the chrysalis, my students are constantly watching our butterfly garden for the slightest bit of movement to see if our butterflies are ready to emerge.  Unfortunately, this phenomenal process generally takes place after school or on the weekend.  After the initial excitement of seeing the Painted Lady butterfly, my students are a little disappointed that they missed the excitement of seeing them come out of the chrysalis.

Enter this amazing device......

At the French Lick Teacher Blogger Retreat last month, each beautiful Vera Bradley Swag Bag included a letter from HUE, allowing teachers to choose between a HUE HD Pro Camera or the HUE Animation Studio.  Both products seemed very useful in the classroom, but I liked the small, lightweight device and the ability to project papers on the screen from anywhere in my classroom with the help of Apple TV and my MacBook so I went with the document camera.

When it arrived, it was everything I dreamed of and more!  I discovered that I could take photos (on key press, movement OR timer!), videos, and even Skype in addition to using it as a document camera.  Since my kinderkids were always so interested in our butterflies, I regularly projected them onto the projection screen while they worked, so we could easily keep a close eye on them.

Here is a picture (taken using the keypress feature) of what my students were able to view on our screen while they were working.  I forgot to snap pictures of the baby caterpillars.  :o

Remember how I said our caterpillars chose to arrive at night and on the weekends?  This was true (except for one!) this year, but a different classroom brought theirs over so we could video it!  Below you will find the video taken using the video feature with HUE.  This is easily saved to a file under my Google Drive, so I was able to easily share it with my colleagues and access it from anywhere!

This video is a bit long, but you will be able to see the butterfly emerge from the chrysalis in the first 30 seconds.  The rest of the time was spent chasing it around the butterfly garden!  Sorry for the poor quality - this was not the fault of HUE, but due to the rush of making sure we didn't miss this breathtaking event!

As the time drew closer to our butterflies arriving, we started to video.  Initially, we set the HUE to record a video each night as we were leaving school.  However, we quickly determined that 17 hours of video was a long time to sift through to find the butterflies, so the next night we changed it to image capture on movement.  We couldn't have been more pleased with the results.  Students loved viewing the pictures of the butterflies, and it was easy to sift through the pictures we saved to a special folder in Google Drive.  I'm thankful this device allowed us the opportunity to capture events that we never would have been able to see!  See below for some of our pictures!

 The bottom right chrysalis, moments before the butterfly comes out!

 See how the chrysalis is becoming more translucent?  These are details the students didn't notice before we had the image capture feature.  It was so neat being able to compare the photos!

 We have a butterfly!  The students were amazed at how wobbly and unsure the butterfly seemed at the beginning.  They couldn't believe how tiny it looked while drying it's wings.

Hanging out while drying its wings.  My students enjoyed watching the entire process with our very own butterflies!

Thanks, HUE, for this great device for educators!