This week is the last week our caterpillars will be in chrysalis and emerge into a butterfly! Since the beginning of spring, we have been very interested in butterflies so as a class we chose that we wanted to dive more in to understanding of these beautiful insects.
In this lesson we read a variety of books about the lifecycle of a butterfly, we created a KWL chart, created our very own bulletin board filled with art of the four stages, and we got to release our classroom butterflies into the world! Since the beginning of spring we have been very interested in butterflies so as a class we chose that we wanted to dive more in to understanding butterflies.
Books read throughout the week:
On Monday, the first thing to introduce this theme was starting off by a KWL chart. What we know, what we want to know, and what we learned (we saved the “L” for Friday). We had a good grasp on what we knew about butterflies. Some things we knew that we wrote on our chart was that “Butterflies eat nectar”, “Caterpillars eat leaves”, and “they build a chrysalis”. Some questions that we wanted to know and that we wrote on our chart was, “How long do they live for?, “do they only live in San Diego?”, and “ what is their favorite flower”.
We have been working on our scissor practice throughout the year and the children have been exceeding at this skill! This project took lots of fine motor work with using scissors, which they absolutely loved because they always cut paper during teacher led activities and during centers. For Monday’s art we created butterfly eggs on a leaf. The children cut out a green leaf and white eggs both out of construction paper.
On Tuesday we created caterpillars! We used construction paper cut green circles for the caterpillars bodies and then drew a face with a marker.
On Wednesday we created a chrysalis! For this stage we used brown paper and a paper bag. Each child cut an oval out of the brown paper and then ripped up pieces of the brown bag to create the chrysalis effect.
On Thursday we finished up our last stage by creating butterflies out of coffee filters. The children colored the coffee filter with a variety of colors. Then they used a spray bottle filled with water and sprayed their coffee filter. They loved watching the colors spread throughout the coffee filter. Then, once they were dry I tied them together with a pipecleaner.
On Friday, we talked about what we had learned about the lifecycle of a butterfly! There was not art for this day because we went to see Ms. Mele at the Art Studio. Our class is one of the last classes to free our. Butterflies, but we saw many of the other classes released butterflies and we came up with nick names for any that we saw! A few that our classroom came up with was, Bubblegum, Ms. Donna (our director), Unicorn-Fluffles, and Pirates Booty!
We had a blast learning about the lifecycle of a butterfly and excited to see what the next topic we will learn about!
Written By: Chantelle Mahusay, 3 year old teacher
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