B is for Butterfly

Alright, so I am FINALLY starting to get back into the swing of things. Although it was far from a normal week, we were able to accomplish alot more than we have in the past few weeks!

My Father’s World Kindergarten
(B is for Butterfly)
So, I have been waiting to complete KJ’s butterfly unit so that I could post about it. We kind of jumped ahead to the Butterfly unit once we got our live butterfly garden. Hands down, that was the best part. I highly recommend that you get one if you have never done it! I think I was just as amused with it as the kids were! It was just amazing to see the transformation from caterpillars to beautiful butterflies. You can see pics of the kiddos enjoying the butterflies from our butterfly garden here and here.

The kids were able to hold one of the butterflies in their hands before it flew away. They thought that was the coolest ever!!!! (This is actually a picture of one of the big boys holding the butterfly.) Notice the wings?!?!? One of the differences between a butterfly and a moth is that when a butterfly lands, its wings are together. When a moth lands, its wings are apart! Did you know that? I sure didn’t!!!

In honor of our butterflies, we made a few butterfly snacks. KJ had fun playing with the butterfly file folder game that we made. She loves it because it is made from photos of real butterflies!

We also made lots of butterfly crafts. Here you can see our crafts about the stages of a butterfly. Below are a few other simple butterfly crafts that we made.
We made the butterfly above by gluing tissue paper to a file folder and added sparkly Mod Podge. Once dry, we cut it out to a butterfly shape and added the popsicle stick, googly eyes, and pipe cleaner. KJ LOVED the sparkles!

This butterfly was made from two coffee filters and food coloring. We folded the filter in half (to get the symmetrical effect) and added drops of food coloring and watched the color spread. Then we repeated it for the second filter. Once dry we opened them up and attached a pipe cleaner.

I also compiled KJ’s work into a lapbook. I had to add a middle insert to the lapbook so that all her work could fit inside. The links for the printables are below.

Cover page from Homeschool Share

Page 1: Butterfly Anatomy from Lapbook Lessons

Page 2: Photos of some of KJ crafts

Page 3: Butterfly/Moth Venn Diagram from Homeschool Share, Life Cycle Wheel from Lapbook Lessons, Life Cycle Book from Worksheet Place

Page 4: KJ “words to remember” and a tissue paper butterfly (stapled behind the page are some of the worksheets that she did throughout the week)

We read LOTS of books about butterflies. One taught us how to make her own origami butterfly. However, the highlight was The Butterfly Alphabet.This book was AMAZING!!! We were able to “discover” every letter of the alphabet hidden in the patterns on butterfly wings. Simply amazing!!! I extended the idea and asked KJ which letters she could find in the first picture of the butterfly above. She found B, D, N, O, S, and Z. Do you see them? Do you see others?

Below are some of the books, etc that we used for our butterfly unit.

We spent the majority of our time focusing on butterflies. We didn’t get nearly as much done in her other subjects, but like I said, we are in the process of getting back to normal.

Singapore Math Essentials
We began her math unit on capacity. I will try to post pics next week.

Spell to Write and Read (SWR)
She took a phonogram test on the first 31 sounds and did great!!! She got them all correct…even the cursive…except for putting a dot on her cursive j. I also made a phonogram book for her that has all 70 phonograms in it.