Preschool Corner: The Butterfly Version

This week, the big news {and excitement} was butterflies!! All of the kids have been fascinated watching our caterpillars grow like crazy and we were able to watch two of them go into their chrysalis at the same time.

A little later in the week, we watched as one of our earlier chrysalis broke and thought we had a little tragedy on our hands. If you want to read a little more about it, you can read about the Birth of a Butterfly on No Ordinary Moments.

BUT...after a little intervention, we had our first butterfly - a girl! In the pictures below you can see one of the caterpillars a few hours before the big change {top left}. The butterfly that emerged is shown in the other three pictures ~ if you look closely, you can see the crumpled wing that she was sporting because she couldn't get herself completely released from the chrysalis without some help.

Zachary pulled out his journal to draw a picture of our caterpillar tank. For some reason he drew four chrysalis'. If you can see the black dots at the bottom of the picture....well, the caterpillars do leave a lot of poop around. :) Of course, he would choose to draw that!

We also talked about the life cycle of a butterfly {in addition to watching it up close and personal!}. Zachary made a little 'book' that he had to sequence in the correct order. Yes, I know he's coloring the egg black...but he thought it was poop. Again. And really, with the amount in our tank, I can't blame the poor kid!

Zachary also had fun working on a butterfly life cycle maze.

Some great butterfly books/printables and sites:

• Life Cycle of a Butterfly mini-book ~ from WorksheetPlace.com
• Emerging Butterfly ~ a few pictures showing a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis
• Life Cycle coloring sheet ~ from KidZone
• Butterfly and moth printouts ~ Enchanted Learning {need membership}
  

Zachary is really enjoying having more 'school time' this year and begs to do certain things with me ~ spelling being the main thing! We do the majority of his spelling time on the whiteboard with our tile letters, but he wanted to write on paper like the girls this week too!

Our fruit and veggie cards also made an appearance this week too. I gave Zachary all the veggies along with the matching word cards and he sorted them out and matched the picture up with the name card by sounding them out.

Patterns and figuring out how to create a shape using various other shapes was something else that Zachary really enjoyed too this week. He started out by creating several bugs, shapes, and kept pulling out cards to complete until I had to take them away...

That's the quick 'sum-up' in our house this week! :) Can't wait to see what's been happening in your preschool time!

About the Preschool Corner:

The Preschool Corner is a place for us to share the ideas we are using during our "preschool time" with our kids. You can join in the fun and record what you are doing in your house. Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below (if you have questions feel free to ask). Be sure to link back to this blog post so that your readers can find some other great ideas too!

The guidelines can be found here if you need them.

Share what you've been doing in your house this week!