Our Lady's Bug

Our Lady's Bug Brownies

We are kicking off Our Lady's Month of May with a science unit on Ladybugs.  Actually it ended up covering Science, Language Arts, History, Faith, Math, Baking, and Art!  How's that for covering all the bases?  We started with reading about Our Lady's Bug, named after Our Lady, followed by baking (using our math, of course) some Ladybug Brownies...yum!  We have discovered how tough this little ladybug truly is with stomping out aphids. (Not surprising if she's named after Our Lady!)  The ladybug has saved countless food supplies over the course of history, including many California orange groves.   So we mail-ordered some to raise and place in our Mary Garden as well as the rest of our yard...The aphids always try to destroy our lovely roses each year! Ladybugs are supposed to be a natural pesticide so we're giving her a whirl!
Humility is an admirable virtue of Our Lady so we also learned a valuable faith and virtue lesson about this in reading and discussing Eric Carle's book, The Grouchy Lady Bug.  Here are a few photos of our fun!

We also did some rock painting for our Mary Garden...Ladybugs seemed like the perfect fit and design.  This was my favorite part of the week!  It has become our family tradition to replant our Mary Garden on Mother's Day so we are getting ready for next weekend!  We painted 1 ladybug rock for each member of our family surrounded by the Marian symbol for Our Lady, Queen of Heaven.

The week ended with another art project, a ladybug wooden craft, courtesy of the Dollar Tree!  Can you guess which one is Queen of the Ladybugs?  And today our ladybug habitat arrived so we can start our science project with raising our own Mary Garden Ladybugs!  Do you think Our Lady had a hand in their arrival today?  We sure think so!

Wishing you all a very blessed Mary Month of  May!

Resources:
Enchanted Learning (Ladybug Lifecycle)
Insect Lore (Ladybug Habitat)
This is a photo of the egg pan that I used for the Ladybug Brownies: