Butterfly vs. Moth

Do you know the difference between a butterfly and a moth?  I always thought it had something to do with the color, as most butterflies are colorful and moths are usually a neutral color.  But it turns out that a moth changes from a caterpillar to a moth in a cocoon, which is a soft silky wrapping and a butterfly changes inside of a chrysalis, which is a hard shell.  Who knew!

I love the fact that even I learn something new with Mother Goose Time.   On Butterfly day we learned about symmetry.  I wasn't getting much enthusiasm from the boys about the idea of making a symmetrical butterfly pattern, so I did it first myself and set it in front of Lachlan.  He was suddenly interested!

He got right to work making his own pattern.

We actually started butterfly the day before these pictures were taken.  I started them on the butterfly life cycle craft.  Lachlan got a bit frustrated with trying to draw stripes on the wet beans for the caterpillar part of the wheel.  So we picked up the project again the next day.  Again, he wasn't interested at all in finishing it, so I got started on it by finishing the caterpillar and then he decided to do the rest on his own.

 Finishing touches.

While Lachlan was working on his Butterfly Life Cycle wheel, Peter was working on illustrating his bilingual book.  I love these little bilingual books, but I really like this one.  This one gave them the opportunity to finish the pictures on each page, not just color them.  The first page said there was one (una) bee, the second had two (dos) caterpillars and the third page three (tres) butterflies.  Well that's what the words said but the page just had a flower and you had to add the rest.  I wrote the number over the number word to help them out. 

Once he had it illustrated and colored he put the pages in order and stapled it together all by himself.  This is where a lot of book knowledge comes into play.  He has to know that the pages are numbered and that they go in order, he also has to know which edge to staple and to know that he has to know which way a book opens. 

Peter started using Mother Goose Time three years ago when he was just 2 years old.  When he was two I would let him scribble on the page and then put it together myself and read the book to him.  Now, he is 5 and can do it ALL by himself.  What a cool progression of skills!

To keep things going I moved onto this butterfly word family game.  We had caterpillars with the full word on it and a butterfly with just the "ug" part and then little square cards to put down on the butterfly to build the word.  

 I had Peter put a letter down and then find the matching caterpillar card. 

These were perfect 3 letter words to practice segmenting on.  This is a skill we are working on in our 1st grade spelling curriculum All About Spelling.  He used the 3 BINGO chips and slid one down for each sound.  /r/ slide one down, /u/ slide the next one down, /g/ slide the last one down.  It helps him to break down the words into the sounds that make it up.

Lachlan was across the table FINALLY working on illustrating his bilingual book.  I say finally because I had been asking him if he wanted to do it for days.  He loves to draw, loves it!  So when I saw he had the opportunity to illustrate a book, I thought, this is perfect!  My enthusiasm was quickly squashed. 

 It had to be his idea I guess.  But he did do a beautiful job and enjoyed it very much.

Back across the table Peter continues to work through all of the words.  First building them on the butterfly and then using the BINGO chips to segment the sounds. 

The next day was Moth day and that is when we learned the difference between a moth and butterfly. 

On moth day we were given our monthly dose of vocabulary cards.  These cards have a graphic and the corresponding word.  We were given a super cool sticky butterfly and they got to swing the butterfly, stick it to a card and then read the card.

Adam's turn.  He can't read, he's only 2, so I read it to him and we repeated the word a couple of times.  But mostly he had a lot of fun with the sticky butterfly and was surprisingly accurate.

Next we talked about moth balls and how people use these smelly balls to keep moths away because moths eat holes through peoples clothes.  Mother Goose Time had us put a smelly oil on cotton balls and have the kids try to toss them in a bowl.  I put two different oils on 6 cotton balls, 3 cotton balls with each sent.  I used citronella on 3 and lavender on 3.

 Then I asked them to sort them by smell.  It was actually quite challenging because I think some of the scent blended when they were in the bowl together during the tossing portion of the game. 

While they were sniffing, Adam stole my camera and took tons of photos.  Then he wanted me to take a photo of him.  Not a hard task. 

It's pretty fun to see them all gathered around working on something together.  I would totally do this again but I would not let the cotton balls be next to each other for too long before they tried to sort them. 

I have missed all this fun.  We have been pretty good about getting all the basic 1st grade curriculum done each day but have not been doing as much of the fun Mother Goose Time learning.  Bees & Butterflies has really captured our attention and we have learned so much.  We should be moving on to Bubbles, Boats & Floats, but we just can't miss out on any of the Bees & Butterfly fun.  So we are finishing every last day before we move on.