Butterfly Life Cycle 3-in-1 Play

(Open ended play)

Introducing science to young children is a blast! They are natural scientists, with so many amazing observations. Their enthusiasm is contagious, and I always find myself getting excited about what they’re learning about.

Y saw a huge butterfly after our swimming session yesterday afternoon, the biggest she ever saw by far. It was colorful, quite as big as my both hands open. She tried to chase it to no avail since she was stuck in between garden plants while the butterfly fly away towards the sky. You can swipe to see the butterfly. She was looking genuinely sad, so I said to her, “Oooh, it must have gone home as we all are, so bye bye butterfly!” She bid her farewell and eventually willing to walk away towards home.

While she was taking a nap directly post swimming, I prepared a book and a tray for her.

Firstly we began by reading a book on butterfly, catterpillar and its life cycle. What is the best book? The Very Hungry Caterpillar, of course.

Then it’s tray time!

Hands-on science activities are so important. What better way to learn about a concept than to get our eyes (and sometimes hands) on it? So here we have matching game and play dough egg, caterpillar and a cocoon along with a folded magazine page butterfly to satisfy her sensory.

I did gave them separately though, not wanting to overwhelmed her.

She took her time teasing me with the arrows which I deliberately didn’t put glue on the paper. She switched some of the directions to realize that it served a purpose. The directions were made to show how the order were. She put them back to how they should be.

When she asked “What’s that?” I said that it’s a matching game. Thanks to our reading session, she know which were what to match. “Egg with egg, caterpillar with caterpillar, cacoon with cacoon, and butterfly with butterfly”, she was rather focusly silent so I said the words for us both while she was laying the matching picture on.

Continued on, I asked if she could name every single stage on each box. She pointed each and said the words herself.

Lastly, I brought in the shaped playdough and magazine butterfly into the tray. Without any prompt she quickly named all corectly and eventually began to play freely.

#butterfly #lifecycle #toddler