We recently had a lot of fun doing a unit about butterflies. My kids don’t like the idea of doing school work during the summer, but we had so much fun that they didn’t even realize they were learning.
We started off by receiving some caterpillars in the mail. They are so tiny when they come! The day we received them the kids drew pictures in their nature journals of what they looked like and then wrote a sentence about what they observed.
Once they reached the chrysalis stage we moved them out of the little cup and into our butterfly net. We made new drawings in our nature journals and added a sentence about what was observed.
Lastly, we were able to observe the butterflies. We kept them for a few days and fed them sugar water.
The kids drew pictures of our painted lady butterflies in their nature journals.
On one of the flaps they drew pictures of the life cycle of the butterfly and labeled what each step in the cycle is.
Inside the lapbook, there is a spot to label the parts of a butterfly, a place to write about how butterflies help plants grow, and a little flip book about butterflies. On one of the leaves we added some sesame seeds to represent the eggs. We did a fun activity to help the kids understand pollination. I forgot to take pictures, so I’ll try to describe it. I cut out flower shaped papers and put crunched up cheese puffs in the middle to represent pollen. Then the kids made a butterfly shape out of pipe cleaner. The butterflies flew to a flower and landed on the “pollen.” After walking on the “pollen,” they flew to a different flower shaped piece of paper and walked around on it. They were able to see how the pollen was left behind on the new flower.
Inside the leaves on the trees we wrote more about butterflies, like where they lay their eggs, what they eat, and how they protect themselves.
This was such a fun unit! My kids didn’t even know that they were doing science or practicing their reading and writing.
How is it possible that it’s been three years since I last posted? I decided that I am going to start trying to post again now that it feels like life has slowed down a little bit.
We finished up school a few weeks ago and one of our favorite units was learning about bees. I hadn’t actually planned on blogging about this, so I only have a few pictures that I took with my phone.
After we spent a few days learning about bees, we drew and labeled bees in our science nature journals.
We also studied the life cycle of a honey bee.
Hunter is looking at a sesame seed with his magnifying glass. We learned that a bee’s brain is the size of a sesame seed. It’s pretty amazing all of the things that bees can do with such tiny brains.
We took a field trip to learn more about bees.
Field trip- looking at the life cycle
Field trip- looking at the different kinds of bees
Field trip- doing activities with hexagons
We made some bee art. The kids had to make a queen bee, a worker bee, and a drone. Each one has different characteristics that they had to represent in their bee drawings.
Learning about bees has definitely made us less scared of them. Now when a bee comes near one of us we just say, “It’s not going to hurt me, it’s just trying to pollinate.”
