Learning About Butterflies - Mother Goose Time

Little Guy loved learning about bees, and was a little hesitant to move on to butterflies.  But this month's Mother Goose Time theme is Bees AND Butterflies.

I still have not gotten very good at scheduling in daily school time, and during weeks that we have a lot of stuff going on I don't do very well at doing any school some weeks.  Yesterday we played a little catch up, since next week is a new month, and that means a new theme for our curriculum.

The first week of butterflies was focused on the lifecycle of a butterfly.  I thought I took a lot of pictures, but I really didn't take nearly enough. 

Of course we started with Eggs, because that is how a butterfly life begins! 

Every month we do a Would You Rather game.  It is a fun way to help children learn to express the reasoning behind their opinions and preferences.  This time Boy Z participated (unfailingly picking the last thing I said in true toddler style) making it so that I could ask Little Guy questions like "Did more people want a pet bee or a pet butterfly?"

We then played Where is the Egg?  Something that Mother Goose Time makes sure to work on at least once a month is the understanding of directional/positional words.  I appreciate it, because unlike letters and numbers, it isn't really something that I think to teach.

Eggs on a Leaf was fun.  Little Guy loves ANY activity that lets him use GLUE, so he was stoked for this one.  He is quite generous with the glue so it didn't try until this morning!  We talked about why leaves are a good place for Butterflies to lay eggs.  Then he wrote his name on a leaf (he actually did better than usual) and I hid the leaves (all three of them, one with my name, one with Little Guy's and one I wrote for Boy Z) in the room and he had to find his.  Then he got to "lay eggs (mini pasta)" on the leaf. 

Caterpillars are the next step in the lifecycle of a butterfly.  We started with What Shall I Eat?  It was a story very similar to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but with healthier food and cuter illustrations.  We talked about how caterpillars eat holes in leaves and make a chrysalis.  Then we read the story, and whenever a color was mentioned, Little Guy found the correct item for the caterpillar to eat.

Then we did a Caterpillar Sculpture, but he did a really bad job on this one because I had to take a phone call and he ended up putting them together and then taking them apart.

We worked on patterns today.  I didn't really understand the purpose of teaching children patterns until I was talking with my older kids about multiplication facts.  We were talking about the "times ones" (1x1, 1x2, etc.) and one of them wasn't really getting it.  She is young, and it isn't relevant to her current schooling, but I realized that recognizing patterns is incredibly important to be able to do math (and probably other things) quickly without having to actually solve all the problems.  So I am happy that Mother Goose Time always teaches kids about patterns.  Both daily during Circle Time and monthly with Pattern Guides and cards.  This month the pattern is ABCD, so we had a Lifecycle Pattern Guide.  I like that it also reinforces the science we have been learning.

Little Guy always says we are "making a long train" when we do the Pattern Guide and Cards

The last thing we did was Wrapped in a Chrysalis, which was cute.  Basically I wrapped Little Guy up, and he had to wriggle free like a butterfly from a chrysalis. 

*We receive our Mother Goose Time curriculum free of charge, in exchange for sharing our honest experiences!*