Life cycle of painted lady butterflies

Students will make a chart of the life cycle of the painted lady butterflies that the class observes over a period of several days.

A lesson plan for grade K English Language Arts and Science

By Anne Allen

Learn more

• Teacher Files Clip art
• The Butterfly Farm A Costa Rican butterfly farm

Related pages

• Butterfly metamorphosis: This is an integrated lesson which is introduced using the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Butterfly metamorphosis is explored through art, math, and writing.
• Butterfly cycle: Students will understand the life cycle of the butterfly and create various art activities that would model metamorphosis.
• An integrated lesson comparing the butterfly and frog life cycles: Students will build on their prior knowledge about the butterfly life cycle to compare and contrast the life cycles of butterflies and frogs. Students will locate butterflies on the school grounds and create pictographs and models of fractions to explain their findings mathematically. Students will also use a variety of resources to read about and study the food, space and air needed by butterflies and frogs to grow. They will create visual and written products to demonstrate their findings.

Related topics

• Learn more about biology, butterflies, caterpillars, hands-on, life cycles, phonemic awareness, read-alouds, and science.

Help

Please read our disclaimer for lesson plans.

Legal

Learning outcomes

Children will make a visual representation of the butterfly lifecycle. They will label the four stages, and review the behaviors and forms that they have seen in Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar and in their own caterpillars as they changed into butterflies.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

60 minutes

Materials/resources

• yellow construction paper, twelve-by-eighteen-inch, cut into six-by-eighteen-inch pieces (one per child)
• dried beans or black-eyed peas (three per child)
• large brown pipe cleaners, cut into 1 ¹/₂ inch pieces (three per child)
• dried shell macaroni (three per child)
• green construction paper, cut into leaf shapes, about three-by-three-inch
• various colored pastel or bright construction paper scraps, about four-by-four-inch (one per child)
• pencils, crayons, scissors, white glue (not glue sticks)
• a copy of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Painted Lady caterpillars can be purchased from Carolina Biological at 1-800-227-1150. Caterpillars come with housing and feeding instructions, as well as instructional materials.

Technology resources

computer with internet connection

Pre-activities

Children should be familiar with the four stages of the butterfly lifecycle: egg, caterpillar, pupa/chrysalis, and butterfly. This lesson can be done after careful instruction on the butterfly lifecycle. It is ideally set up as part of a unit that includes the raising of Painted Lady Butterflies in the classroom. The children should be familiar with Eric Carle’s book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Activities

1. Teacher must provide the children with yellow construction paper strips and a green leaf, white glue, pencils and crayons. The following materials should also be available at the children’s tables: dried beans or black-eyed peas, pieces of brown pipe cleaner, dried shell macaroni, construction paper scraps, and scissors.
2. Ask each child to write his or her name on the back of the yellow paper. Show the children how to fold the short ends of the paper strip together and crease it in the middle. When the children have completed this task, ask them to fold the strip again, putting the short ends together again.
3. Ask the children where the caterpillar came from, and show them the first page of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle. Read the first page to the children, pointing to each word as it is read. Talk about the way the egg sits on the leaf.
4. Tell the children that in the first panel at the left end of the yellow paper, they will write the word “eggs” at the bottom, leaving room for the picture they will make next. Say the word eggs slowly, emphasizing the sounds heard in the word. Ask the children to help you spell the word, naming the letters of the sounds they hear, and write it in a place where the children can see it, “eggs.” Ask the children to write the word in the first panel. Then model gluing the green leaf to the yellow paper in the first panel, and ask the children to do the same. Ask the children to look at the materials on the table, and talk about what they might use to represent the eggs on a leaf. Show them a previously completed model that has three dried beans glued in place on a green leaf, and ask them to add three eggs to the leaf on their paper.
5. Next, ask the children what they think will go in the next panel. Refer to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and ask how the egg changed in the story. What popped out of the egg?
6. Continue in similar manner to complete the second, third and fourth panels of the lifecycle chart, writing the appropriate label in each panel, and referring to The Very Hungry Caterpillar for clues about what should come next. The second panel is to be named “caterpillars,” the third panel is named “pupa” and the fourth panel is named “butterflies.”
7. Be sure to talk about the idea that if three eggs hatch, there will be three caterpillars. If three caterpillars each make a chrysalis, there will be three of them. If three chrysalises each release a butterfly, there will again be three of them.
8. In the second panel, the children must draw a small branch with their crayons. Some leaves drawn on the branches might show holes where the caterpillars have been eating. Each child will take three pieces of brown pipe cleaner, and bend them to represent wiggling caterpillars crawling along a branch. Glue them in place in the second panel.
9. In the third panel, the children must again draw a small branch with crayons. Three shell-shaped dried macaronis will represent the chrysalises made by the caterpillars, as they enter the pupa stage.
10. In the fourth panel, the children have a place to put a beautiful butterfly cutout of their own creation. (I show the children how to make a simple butterfly shape using four round-cornered triangles that connect at a body shape. The children are able to draw, color, and cut out this butterfly.)
11. Be sure to watch and intervene when children become confused about the panel in which they should be working. In order for this to be a successful experience, there needs to be an accurate sequence from left to right.

Assessment

Teacher observation of participation in discussion, and completed lifecycle charts will serve as assessment tools.

Supplemental information

Check out these big books:

• A Butterfly is Born, by Melvin Berger
• Big Book Magazine on Insects, from Scholastic

Journaling can be done as the children watch their butterflies develop from caterpillars. Journal prompts your children might enjoy include these:

• Where have you seen caterpillars outside?
• What is the new home like that is provided for the pupa before they emerge from the chrysalises as butterflies?
• What is your home like?
• Have you ever changed homes before?
• What was that like?
• What stage of the lifecycle would you like to be, if you could choose to become one?
• How have you changed as you have grown older?

Draw a picture of yourself as a baby, and another picture of yourself now. The teacher may want to share pictures of him or herself as a baby, a child, and a teenager. The children may then want to project what they will look like as a teenager, and then an adult.

• What did our caterpillars eat?
• What did the caterpillar in Eric Carle’s story eat?
• What do you eat?
• What will our butterflies look like when they emerge?
• What kind of butterfly would you like to be, if you could become one?
• What will the butterflies see, and where will they go when they are free?

The children may use body movements to express themselves as caterpillar, pupa, butterfly. Make caterpillars using pompons, tongue depressors, and wiggle eyes. Encourage making patterns with the pompons.

Create and solve story problems about eggs, caterpillars, pupa and butterflies. More advanced students may be able to represent these story problems on Kid Pix. The children may use Kid Pix paintbrush to create pictures of each stage of the butterfly lifecycle. Pull them into a slide show to play for the rest of the children.

Access and print butterfly pictures from the World Wide Web. Students may sequence pictures of the butterfly lifecycle. This may be done with laminated picture cards provided by the teacher, or in a cut and paste worksheet of lifecycle pictures.

As a center activity, create a poster of a butterfly habitat and use butterfly stickers to inhabit it. Each child needs a blank graph to complete, graphing the butterflies on the poster, by color or kind.

Watch video of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Comments

The life-cycle chart may be more effectively created in two thirty-minute sessions, rather than one sixty-minute work period. It may also be set up as a small group activity, or as an assisted center.

In the 2000–2001 school year, our principal purchased caterpillars for every classroom teacher in the school who wanted to raise butterflies in the room, as part of our Earth Day celebration.