For all ages. The metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies has to be one of nature's most spectacular displays.

Every year our local conservatory has a butterfly exhibition, and every year our daughter has to go. If she gets really lucky, one of the butterflies lands on her, and it's a great year! I explained to her that the butterfly's wings are made up of thousands of scales and that she must not touch them because they are easily damaged. She was a little confused by that. "Do they have more than 100 scales?" she asked. That is her current limit on numbers, so I told her that there are many more than that. "You mean a thousand million?" I didn't know that we would get into a counting discussion, but there you go. I'm not even sure whether anyone has actually sat down and counted that high, so I tell her that's why we need to have more discussions on mathematics, because learning the "patteren" as she calls it, will help out.

Back to butterflies. This year we purchased some caterpillars from the conservatory gift shop and decided to let her in on the secret. These "bugs" were going to become butterflies. I think by now my daughter is skeptical when I tell her things like that. "For real?" is her favorite refrain. "Yes, for real," I confirmed.

Much to Mom's chagrin, I insisted that the caterpillars live on our dining room table, where they were clearly visible at each meal. Mom explained that having larvae on the dinner table is not to her liking. "What's a larva, Dad?" Well, its part of our science experiment, and every day we are going to check the length of those larvae to see how fast they grow.

Well, Mom no longer has dinner with us, but it sure was amazing to see how fast those caterpillars grow. By about a week they had become five times their original length, and their mass must have increased 50 times! Yes, my daughter can count that high, and I ask her how big her baby sister would be if she grew like a caterpillar. A thousand million times, she thinks. Okay, so we still have some math work to do.

It isn't long before we have several cocoons on the ceiling of the container. I ask her if they stick their heads to ceiling or their bottoms. She has an answer, "Their bottoms!" Why is that?

A week or so later we have a whole habitat full of beautiful butterflies. They all hatched on exactly the same day literally within an hour of one another. Why is that?

It still amazes me to see this even after observing it so many times. See, those little bugs really did change into butterflies!

For real!

Questions to ask your child as you are observing metamorphosis:

• How many scales are there on a butterfly's wings?
• If a baby human grew as fast as a caterpillar how big would it be as an adult?
• Why do all the butterflies from a set of eggs transform so closely together?
• Why exactly does this animal behave like this? Does it give it some advantage out in nature to have a life cycle like this?
• Where do butterflies go in the winter?