Toddler Tales and Trails Butterflies: July

The boys and I led an hour class at a our local nature center yesterday.  We focused on Butterflies and Birds and a scavenger hunt for our walk.  Butterflies turned out to be the perfect theme as monarch butterflies have been sighted right at the park and we have seen many swallowtails in the gardens as well.

 We started the day with a short, simple activity of putting dot stickers on cut out butterflies.  If kids finished early they could color, but mainly this was just an activity to build fine motor skills and get the theme into kids minds.  I just remembered that there is a way that you can fold a piece of paper so that it looks like a caterpillar and then open it for a butterfly.  That would have been fun too. 

Our stories for the day were The Caterpillar and the Pollywog by Jack Kent and Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian by Margarita Engle and Julie Paschkis. Although I changed the words a bit, we did a poem with hand actions called The Caterpillar from a book called Hand Rhymes collected by Marc Brown.  

Along the hike we looked for butterflies and also places where they might leave eggs or gather food and pollen.  We also just had fun finding signs of animals in the forest.  We stopped in a few places and put up our “deer ears” to listen to birds and see if we could spot them.  After spotting a gray squirrel we recited the Gray Squirrel shake your bushy tale poem…and in closure we sang Shake your Sillies Out accompanied by a picture book by Raffi.  

The idea I have behind a once a month Toddler Tales and Trails class is to just to get children outside and to bring in new concepts to explore and focus on.  Butterflies will be one of our explorations as a family this month.  One of my children has already asked if we can raise butterflies again & so I will look into it as well as perhaps we will go to a plant store and find out what plants we could add to our garden to attract more butterflies.  Also later in the month I will be setting out a booth with a butterfly focus in our local P-Patch.