Butterfly Life Cycle Fun

We are having lots of fun in grade 1 learning all about butterflies. The butterfly kit we ordered was very disappointing. All the caterpillars died and so we have been reading books, watching videos and making art to try and figure out what should have happened and what might have gone wrong.

In this video the photo and text explain the life cycle of a monarch butterfly. By watching this we were able to determine that we didn't have monarch butterflies in our classroom because the caterpillars look different.

This video from Ce n'est pas sorcier showed us that their are lots of different kinds of caterpillars and butterflies. It has some tricky language but some amazing images too. My students loved being able to see different types of caterpillars and butterflies up close. We also liked learning about how silk is made.

We also read lots of different kinds of books from the library about butterflies. They all seemed to tell us the same thing. Butterflies have a 4 part life cycle. We decided we would paint the life cycle. We painted one stage in each wing.

After we decided we would try and write about everything we learned. We used this template.

Click on image to see full document

What did I learn at school today? Even when disaster strikes I can make the best of it. The students were very excited to learn about butterflies and try and figure out what went wrong with our batch. They still learned about the needs of animals and about the life cycle. Has this kind of thing ever happened to you? What did you do?

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What I learned at school today

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