Teaching young students about the wonderful journey of caterpillars transforming into butterflies can be both educational and fun! There’s something fascinating and magical about the process a caterpillar goes through before it turns into a beautiful butterfly, one that young children just adore. In this blog, we highlight a number of children’s storybooks along with some caterpillar and butterfly activities you can do with your young students in the classroom. All of these templates have been created for the Teach Starter Little Learners Month that is happening in the month of March.
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!
- Firstly, we can’t go past everyone’s favourite – ‘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.
- Finally, this storybook – ‘Gotta Go! Gotta Go!’ A super cute take on how to explain the cycle of the transformation from a caterpillar to butterfly is shown in this gorgeous storybook.
Butterfly Life Cycle Concertina Activity
This is a super cute hands-on butterfly life cycle activity that incorporates a lot of fine motor activities including cutting, colouring and gluing. This activity encourages children to cut out the main parts of a butterfly life cycle and glue them on the concertina in order!
Your students will love that they can close the concertina to reveal their beautiful butterfly. Cute!
Cute Butterfly Craft for Preschool Kids
This has to be my favourite idea – it is just super cute! Your students will absolutely love decorating their very own butterfly wings! Simply take a full-body photo of each student and print out the photos. Then, provide this printable butterfly wings template for them to decorate their wings however they wish.
Create a craft station and invite your students to let their imaginations run wild. Provide paint, coloured pens, feathers and any other craft supplies you have available!
The classroom display you can create with these gorgeous 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.
Simply 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.
- Then, Students can decorate their booklet.
Encourage some home-school communication by sending this completed book home with the students and encouraging them to read the booklet to their parents.
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