By Katie & Wendy
June 4, 1997
June 4, 1997 You may have noticed that even though we do not have our butterfly larva as yet we are still beginning our lessons. I am doing this because then we can review what we have learned and at the same time "see" what all of these things are that we have been talking about. Today we began our lesson by making a art project. It was a butterfly of course! This project helped us to reinforce our comprehension skills of being able to listen and follow verbal directions and of interpretation; we excersized our fine motor skills by coloring, cutting, and pasting; we reinforced our eye/hand coordination skills. The directions for making our butterfly can be found in the "Projects, Resources, and Additional Enrichment" section of our journal. (SPECIAL NOTE: If you find something in our journal that you want to look at but can not find, don't worry, we may not have gotten it posted as yet. Eventually everything that is suppose to be here will; please be patient with us. This whole process is new to me, and many times I am learning as I go:) SOME THINGS I KNOW ABOUT BUTTERFLIES ...they have wings ...they have lots of colors ...they are an insect ...they can fly ...they have antennae ...they are fun to watch ---Katie We also know that butterflies can be helpful insects. Butterflies do important things. Katie has a little story to tell you what they do that makes them good bugs. "Butterflies Are Good For Plants" A Short Story by Katie One day a butterfly landed on one of my nectar plants. He was eating for a little bit. While he was eating he was getting sticky stuff on his feet. And then I saw him fly away to a different plant. The sticky stuff on my butterflies feet went on the new flower he landed on. Because my buttefly did that, in a long many days, I will see more flowers and plants. But not right away. We have to wait for them to grow bigger so we can see them. That is right, butterflies are helpful insects. They do these important things: **They pollinate flowers and plants. Flowers and plants are pretty to look at. Some new plants give us food to eat; and all plants and flowers help put oxygen in the air. Oxygen is the stuff in the air that we breath. To pollinate means, in a sense, that bugs pick up tiny specks of a plant on them when they land to eat, or even rest. When they fly off and stop on another plant they leave these tiny specks on the new plant. This is what helps plants to make new plants. Here are some interseting things we also learned about butterflies. *There are many, many kinds of butterflies in the world. *All butterflies are not the same. There are many different colors and patterns on butterflies. This helps them to find other butterflies that are like them, it helps to protect them, and it helps to camoflage them. *Butteflies come in different shapes and sizes. Some butterflies are big and some are smaller. We learned that all of the flying, winged insects that look like butterflies are not all butterflies. Another insect just like the butterfly is the moth. There are ways to tell the butterflies and the moths apart. Katie has explained some of the differences here. I have put these differences in a chart here for you to see. After our discussion of moths and the difference between them and the butterfly we talked about butterfly parts. Below is a picture of a butterfly with it's parts labeled for you to see. After the chart we have explained what all of these differents parts do for the butterfly. When we finished, we compared butterflies to people...to ourselves. We found that people and butterflies have some of the same body parts! Katie has made a list of some of the things we have found out. We put them in this chart for you. On one side of the chart we can see what body parts Katie has; on the other side we can see the body parts that a butterfly has. BUTTERFLY BODY PARTS & WHAT THEY DO WINGS: Butterflies use their wings for many things. They use them to fly to places for food, for getting away from their enemies, and to find other butterflies. ANTENNAE: Butterflies use their antennae for "smelling & feeling" things. They have "odor detectors", or receptors as they are called, on their antennae. PROBISCUS: This is the mouthpart of the butterfly. It is like a long tube that the insect sucks and drinks from. It reminds me (Wendy) of a straw that can be curled up and down. This is where we ended our lesson for the day. We played a math-type of card matching game when we were done to once again reinforce the concept of pairs, and at the same time it was also an opportunity for us to review our numbers. This activity was very simple for Katie to do and she seemed to have fun with it. It is explained below. MATH CARD MATCHING GAME Materials Needed: 1 deck of standard playing cards, a willing child Directions: Take the deck of cards and first remove the Jokers. I then took a moment to explain how the face cards would work. In this case I told Katie that she should ignore the letters on the cards and instead concentrate on what the picture looked like. I then removed 1/2 of the deck, so that I only had 2 matches with each card, instead of the 4 that you usually have. The deck of cards was then shuffled and placed face down next to her. For each turn Katie was to draw a card from the deck and flip it over. The first card was laid face up in front of her. (Because it has no match yet.) She then had to continue drawing the cards. Everytime Katie picked up a card she was to find the match from the ones face up on the table. If a card matched she was to put the matches together. If there was no match with the card that she choose it was to be laid by itself, face up on the table until she drew the correct match. She continued this until all cards are correctly matched. ****For additional enrichment we then took the cards and laid them in sequential order.