Butterflies!

Since the last month of school was a total and utter whirlwind, I did not get a chance to update my blog with all of the fun things we did together!  Our first activity for May was our butterflies.  We talked butterflies to DEATH because we love them too much!  First we discussed the life cycle process and made a circle map about insects.  We wrote about insects in our writing center, made beautiful insects in the art center, and in our science lab we followed up and reviewed them.  THEN it was time for butterflies!  Most students learned the basics last year in our Transition class (that's what our school calls preschool).

Our butterfly unit correlated with our symmetry discussions in math, so we made butterfly symmetry art projects.  They colored the butterflies and glued them to a construction paper backing for morning work, and then later that afternoon we reviewed lines of symmetry, and the students glued paper decorations to their butterfly wings.  Look how great they turned out!

The following week we had butterfly centers, and the students made a butterfly book that my k-teammate found from Enchanted Learning.  It's a very simple book and is perfect for centers because it reviews important vocabulary and gives them a chance to decorate when we would not be able to have enough time in a whole-class setting.  Let me tell you how much my kinders LOVED to color this year!  :o)

The last piece of our butterfly puzzle was to actually watch the process ourselves.  Our school ordered butterfly larvae and they came overnight!  We watched as the little baby caterpillars grew and grew and then made their chrysalises.  Surprisingly enough, I have never seen this process from start to finish, so I think I may have been as excited if not MORE excited than my students!  :o)  I promise, if you knew me, you would not be surprised at all...

I only took pictures of our caterpillars when they were big.  Again, school being as busy and hectic as it was the last few weeks of school, I totally missed the photo-op of the chrysalises and the butterflies.  But ask any of my kinders and they will tell you that the butterflies came out just in time for school to be out - I'm talking about 3 days before we graduated!  Whew!  Here are the snaps of the caterpillars and our butterfly pavilion borrowed from one of my k-teammates.