Home schooling! Butterfly lessons

The beginning of home school. We always knew we wanted to home school our children but now that time has finally come. Well technically we don't have to start until fall of 2014 but we are diving in a little early.

I'm hoping this info will be helpful to another home school family. However you will need to pick and choose which parts you think are suitable for your child and where they are at. We've been doing little bits of schooling here and there but nothing formal yet. For the past year I've been having her work on and off in the little $1 workbooks you can pick up from Target or the Dollar Tree. She did one pre-k one in the beginning and then we decided to skip to 1st and 2nd grade math when she sat down for 15 minutes and completed the whole 30 pg. book. It wasn't challenging enough for her and I was worried she would start to lose interest. Reading on the other hand we are still working on. So fast forward to the present... 

We bought a butterfly pavilion. Our caterpillars came in the mail and are now encased in tiny wiggly chrysalis. Did you know the chrysalis wiggle? Yeah I didn't really know that until I read it in the little booklet. It was a little strange moving the little papers they are attached to over to the pavilion when they are wiggling on them. That's what I was doing last night.

So today I decided it was the day to learn about butterflies. We already briefly discussed the life cycle of a butterfly. I drew pictures and then Ember and Nova both draw their interpretation of the life cycle. We reviewed that and then we talked about how butterflies taste with their feet and how yucky that would be when we put our shoes on if we did that. This part really got Nova's attention. We talked about the different body parts of a butterfly. Head, thorax, abdomen, and things like wings, legs, eyes, antenna, ect. We discussed what they eat and how those eating habits help plants. Then we sang a song about butterflies and then both girls colored a picture of a butterfly. Here is the link to the printout. This was great because it allowed us to work on sounding out words which is something Ember needs to really work on. This is still very hands on work for us so Nova just colored as she saw fit. At 3 she still has a while to just play but she does like to feel included. Then we ate mac and cheese bugs for lunch which has little caterpillar and butterfly shapes in it. ;-)

Additionally I also printed out this sheet for Ember. I printed it out at 125% to make it easier to see. This is one she can do mostly by herself until she gets to the part where she needs to read the colors to use.

Here are a couple other resources that maybe helpful if you want to put together a butterfly lesson plan.

butterfly lesson plan - This is where I got a lot of my ideas from and then I expanded from there.
life cycle - I didn't find this until after I drew one.
beginner math - If you are just introducing math then this might be helpful.