Beautiful Butterflies

We finished out our Bees and Butterflies unit this week by learning about different kinds of butterflies.  Miss M later told me her favorite is the Blue Morpho.  I love the way she says it. :)

I decided to do the storytelling activity a little differently than we often do; I gave each girl a butterfly, bee and flower and then let them tell me the story.  Our friend started it off, Miss M played off of hers and Littlest buzzed around them both, flapping like a butterfly.  They went back and forth, helping their insects find food and take it back home, for quite a while.  It was fun to watch and I wished I'd recorded it.

You can tell by the blur that they
were pretty into the music.

We made the butterfly wands, giving the girls free rein to decorate however they felt.  Littlest stuck mostly to stickers while the older girls did more drawing and approximated patterns more similar to an actual butterfly.  Instead of just using the music CD, we turned on our Dance N Beats DVD for this month and they danced with their butterfly props for a few songs before I brought them back in for another activity.

They loved the matching game.  I gave each girl a caterpillar and they had to find their matching butterfly.  Miss M remembered days later that she was the Peacock Butterfly.  I may need to make a few more cards to go with that game.

I think my favorite activity this month was the journal.  We were really good about making sure we stayed caught up and both of the older girls are really getting into writing and making up their own stories about the pictures they draw.  Littlest even kept at her journal for just as long as the big girls, even if she mostly just drew circles.  The journal is such a great way to practice a host of skills, including fine motor/writing, counting, language, shape and color identification, etc...This summer I plan to buy each girl a composition notebook and we are going to draw a picture every night after dinner about their favorite activity from the day.  It will be so fun to pull these out when they are older to see how much they've grown and to review the things that were important to them when they were little.

We played the Pollinate the Flowers number identification game as outlined in the Teachers Guide at first but after a while I adapted it to their attention span.  They got really excited when I started spinning the spinner and telling them which number they had to find and bring to me, although Miss M got upset at the end because she wasn't the one to find the last number.  She thought that meant she hadn't won the game.  I didn't even know she had a concept of win/lose because we don't play games that way yet.  It gave me the opportunity to talk to her about the purpose of the game and sportsmanship.  I'm not sure how much sunk in but we will find out the next time we try this game.

Pollinator BINGO was a blast and a great way to work on language skills. Instead of just showing the girls which butterfly or flower I had drawn for them to find on their cards, I described it (three pink flowers, a blue butterfly with dots).  They also had to look closely because some of them shared characteristics but were different (a great way to work on the concept of same/different).  Miss M would yell BINGO really loudly every time she got three in a row and informed me that she was calling the dog Bingo to come play with her butterflies.  BINGO games are super easy to make yourself with clipart or even just a couple sheets of stickers and you can use them to work on colors, numbers, sight words, alphabet skills or vocabulary.

I think one of the girls' favorite activities was the Giant Blue Morpho activity where they measured their hands and different objects to see if they could find something that was the same size as the butterfly.  I pulled out a measuring tape and secured it at the eight inch mark so they could use it themselves to measure the toys they found.

The postcards are always fun and this month Miss M decided to use it as a thank you card for a friend who had invited her over to play in his backyard a couple weeks ago.  She insisted on writing his name (with me telling her the letters) and then trying to copy the message I wrote on it for her.  She was very proud to hand it to his mom.

That was our month.  This was a really fun unit and I look forward to doing it again when the girls are older and expanding on some of the fun details we learned.