Our Butterfly Books

Throughout our butterfly unit, we took time almost every day to write about the things we were learning.

Each of my students are working on different stages of pre-writing development, just as they should be at this age. This was a great process to let them apply their developing skills within a meaningful context.

First, we wrote about caterpillars:

I always encourage the students to tell me what words to write for their picture or markings. This helps them to understand that what they write has value, meaning, and purpose. It also models the act of writing words to represent thoughts and ideas. And if students are interested and ready to write words and letters on their own, I of course encourage those efforts as well.

Then we wrote about caterpillars forming a chrysalis. You might notice a lot of 'J' shapes in these pages because we talked a lot about and observed our caterpillars hang in the shape of a 'J' before forming their chrysalis.

Then we did a couple different butterfly pages.

For one of the pages, I demonstrated how to draw the basic shapes of a butterfly and we all tried to draw one together that looked like the ones we had raised.

Finally we did some coloring, cutting, and gluing for a page depicting the butterfly life cycle.