Butterfly Life Cycle I

We have spent quite some time over the past week or so exploring and discovering the life cycle of the butterfly. Initially I was very drawn to the beautiful water colour of these balancing butterflies by childhood magic.

Out came our rarely used watercolours and a new dimension of being artistic was discovered. I really do prefer water colours for painting inside. I like that we have lots of dry paint to be mixed with the wet brush (which I can wet for dear little Eee keeping the jar of water out of her reach). It means there is so much less mess than having blobs of acrylic paints around the place. You can see Ess' work above with my own butterfly in the background.

We moved our bodies to music as I shared a little story of the hatching of a fuzzy wuzzy caterpillar creeping, creeping, who spun himself a blanket to sleep in, before he emerged transformed into a beautiful butterfly. The girls enjoyed dressing up in their homemade butterfly wings, a gift from my sister years ago, to flutter around the room in to a favourite song:

Flutter by, butterfly,

Flutter by up in the sky.

We then discovered the proboscis of a butterfly is used for drinking. A straw makes a great proboscis inserted through a water coloured flower atop a pretty flower paper cup filled with water. This is a great idea for encouraging children to drink water, my pair didn't stop drinking for ages through their butterfly proboscises.

Our resources included the diagrams of the lifecycle of a butterfly found at The Children's Butterfly Site along with the ever-loved classic book:

The rainbow colours of Eric Carle's butterfly are very inspiring. All of Ess' work is coloured rainbow style. It is definitely her favourite technique at the moment.

We also created a model demonstrating the life cycle of a butterfly using something quite unexpected. We'll reveal that tomorrow.