After watching a recent episode of Barney, my girls and I were inspired (yes, Barney inspired us—lol) to do some butterfly-related crafts and activities.
We sang Butterfly, Butterfly, Fly, Fly Away (which we heard on Barney) many times this week. If you don’t know the tune, it makes a great counting poem too. (Click the photo to download.)
Next we printed out and made our own Butterfly Life Cycle book. This was a download from The Montessori Print-Shop.
The Montessori Print Shop also has Butterfly Life Cycle cards, which I printed and laminated. We looked at the pictures and went over the terminology. Then we put them in order. We also practiced ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) I appreciate that these materials used real photographs of the butterfly stages. The materials printed nicely and are a wonderful nature resource.
For a twist, I printed another set of the Butterfly Life Cycle cards—one in grey-scale and the other in color. I mounted the grey-scale cards onto cardstock. I laminated and then cut the colored cards so that they would be individual puzzles. The grey-scale cards were the control cards to help my toddler figure out the puzzles. She would match the colored pieces and place them onto the control cards.
We made our annual coffee-filter butterflies 🙂 My 4yr. old is getting good at carefully dipping the edges of the filter into the food coloring water.
My 4yr. old picked the funky fuzzy pipe cleaners—the ones that kind of look like giant caterpillars. You could use half of one pipe cleaner to make the caterpillar (just glue wiggle eyes on it) and the other half to fold over the tie-dyed coffee filter.
We also reviewed our Letter Bb’s with this butterfly handwriting sheet/poem (click to download.)
For more butterfly craft, poem and games ideas check out:
Disclosure: I was given a free download from Montessori Print Shop for review purposes only. Opinions are my own. The way I used the cards are Montessori-influenced but not necessarily the official Montessori method.
I love the greyscale idea, that is super!
😛 Valerie
So cute!
Fun! and I might add that your Squidoo lens is awesome! Love those caterpillar magnets!
I love your butterflies and caterpillars.
I definitely know that song… and from Barney! I think my son would like these activities to go along with it!
Awesome butterfly unit! I love the Montessori Print Shop butterfly life cycle materials, and your ideas here and on your Squidoo lens are wonderful! Great idea to make control cards in greyscale, too. 🙂 Deb @ LivingMontessoriNow.com
We LOVE studying the butterfly lifecycle in our home too. I love all the activities you planned to correlate with the Montessori Print Shop cards. It looks like you guys had lots of fun. 🙂
Lori @ Montessori MOMents
Such a great activity! I would love those butterfly wings for the kids, just like on Barney! LOL
I featured your post today at http://livingmontessorinow.com/2011/05/23/activity-of-the-week-life-cycle-of-a-butterfly/
Thanks for sharing the download. I love everything that you did for this activity!
I am a follower. but have been a bit of a blog slacker lately. I actually found the link from The Work Plan. So, I wanted you to know that you are getting some extra blog love there too! I am glad they linked there or I would have missed the download!
Thanks again!
Kerri
I enjoyed re-visiting your post! I featured your life cycle of a butterfly photo in my Montessori-Inspired Caterpillar-Butterfly Unit at http://livingmontessorinow.com/2012/05/17/montessori-inspired-caterpillar-butterfly-unit/