Butterflies activities make spring magical for kids, and they’re pretty darn fun for teachers too! There’s something fascinating about the process a caterpillar goes through before it turns into a beautiful butterfly, one that young children just adore, and the process is chock-full of learning opportunities. So let’s dive right in, shall we?
There are a number of children’s storybooks we love for this spring lesson, plus some caterpillar and butterfly activities you can do with your young students in the classroom.
Best of all, teaching young students about life cycles is the perfect way to help them understand the world around them.
Caterpillar and Butterfly Books for Kids
Introducing a new concept to young children is always done best through a beautifully illustrated children’s book. Therefore, we’ve picked our top four children’s storybooks that we think are the perfect addition to any early years classroom!
- We can’t go past everyone’s favorite ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’.
- Next up we have the beautifully illustrated ‘A Butterfly Is Patient’, a beautiful storybook about the huge variety of butterflies.
- ‘Waiting for Wings’ is a wonderful rhyming story that provides clear answers to all the questions your students may have about the butterfly life cycle.
- ‘Gotta Go! Gotta Go!’ offers an adorable take on how to explain the cycle of the transformation from a caterpillar to butterfly is shown in this gorgeous storybook.
- ‘Adios Oscar!’ is a butterfly fable that follows a caterpillar’s frustrations when he emerges from his chrysalis not as a beautiful butterfly but as a moth with a taste for sweaters! A story of acceptance, this storybook offers social and emotional lessons alongside science.
Butterfly Life Cycle Activity
This is a hands-on butterfly life cycle activity that incorporates a lot of fine motor activities including cutting, coloring, and gluing. This activity encourages children to cut out the main parts of a butterfly’s life cycle and glue them on the accordion fold in order!
Your students will love that they can close the accordion fold to reveal their beautiful butterfly. We see some Boomerang action for your Instagram in your future!
Cute Butterfly Craft for Preschool Kids
Need something for the youngest kids? Your students will absolutely love decorating their very own butterfly wings, and you can simply take a full-body photo of each student and print out the photos. Then, use the wings from the craft above to decorate however they wish.
Create a craft station and invite your students to let their imaginations run wild. Provide paint, colored pens, feathers, and any other craft supplies you have available!
The classroom display you can create with these crafty creations will make everyone smile!
Butterfly Life Cycle Student Booklet
This simple activity is perfect for the little cherubs in your class. A great activity which incorporates simple sight words (this, is, a), plus sentence structure (capital letter and full stop), all while showing their knowledge of the butterfly life cycle.
Print out the Butterfly Life Cycle Booklet for each of your students, and have them follow these directions:
- Students cut along the dotted lines.
- Using the square images of the egg, butterfly, chrysalis, and caterpillar, students glue these on the ‘This is the…’ sentence strips.
- Students then need to put each page in the correct order to create a mini-sentence strip booklet.
- Finally, decorate them!
Encourage some home-school communication by sending this completed book home with the students and encouraging them to read the booklet to their parents.
Share your amazing caterpillar and butterfly activities with us on Instagram by tagging @teachstarter_us.
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