Insects! Butterflies, Ladybugs, and Bees!

Caterpillars/Butterflies

I love love love having caterpillars in our classroom and watching them grow! I always order 2 cups of live caterpillars from Insect Lore. We make sure to keep an eye on our little friends as we learn about each part of their life cycle.






Then we let our butterflies go in the school garden which always has some beautiful flowers that the butterflies love to land on for their first outside flight! Bittersweet.


Some of my favorite caterpillar/butterfly projects...

The life cycle butterfly. Each white circle is labeled and illustrated to show the eggs, larva, pupa, and adult. They looked so pretty dangling around our room.


We did a directed drawing of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and then wrote informative sentences about our caterpillars.


I had to beg and plead with the kids to let me hang their caterpillars up as well as their coffee filter butterflies! They wanted to take them home immediately. The kids used markers to completely cover their coffee filter. Then we soaked them with a water bottle and let them dry before finishing them off with a colored clothes pin and pipe cleaner antennaes.




Arg! I can't find pictures to show some other fun stuff we did. But another favorite was making our Very Hungry Caterpillar retell puppet bags to use while watching the video of the book. The kids loved making their own book! Each day we added a new page with a sentence about what our caterpillar ate on each day of the week. The foods they came up with were quite interesting! And then I set them out for Open House.

Ladybugs!

I lost track of time this year and forgot to order ladybug larva so that we could watch them grow :( But we still managed to learn a lot of interesting things about ladybugs while creating some fun projects.

After reading The Grouchy Ladybug, the kids made a mad ladybug and wrote a sentence about what makes them mad and grouchy. Many of the kids complained about a sibling taking their toys or candy lol.






Ladybugs are also a great way to practice addition! The kids used Bingo daubers to make their own addition problem and solve it.






Ahhh our informative ladybugs were flippin adorbs! We started by making a directed drawing of a ladybug. Next we made grass by tearing green paper. And last we added a speech bubble for our ladybug to say something informational.








We also performed "Five Little Ladybugs Sitting on a Leaf". Sooooooo cute!

Bees!

We marbled painted bees! 

This was a fun team challenge. I made some numbered bee hives and the kids had to solve subtraction problems on the cards and place them in the correct hive.

I forgot to take a picture of our bee poster! So I'll have to add that later. But I just love making informational posters with the kids. I always hang it up next to a themed project.