Hi there!
We've been busy in first grade! We've been studying plants and insects like worms, ladybugs and butterflies. We were so thrilled when a very nice parent from another first grade classroom brought in caterpillars for all the first grade classes a couple of weeks ago. She has lots of milkweed growing in her yard, and caterpillars (especially the ones that turn into Monarch butterflies!) love eating milkweed. She brought in some of the milkweed leaves so the caterpillars had food in their cages, and they didn't require anything else from us! We observed them as they crawled around for a few days munching through the milkweed, and then, almost before our eyes, each one began to form a chrysalis around itself. I felt very lucky that my Firsties were able to witness one of the caterpillars forming a chrysalis - although there's many great resources for teachers to show this process, nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes! Unfortunately it happened so quickly I wasn't able to get a photograph of it. We continued studying the life cycle of a butterfly in class and used these great resources:
Books:
Butterfly Life Cycle (non fiction) by Jeff Bauer 
Monarch Butterfly by Gail Gibbons
The Life Cycle of a Butterfly by Bobbie Kalman
Technology:
I found two GREAT resources for the iPad for teaching the life cycles of plants and butterflies to help differentiate and integrate technology into the curriculum. You can buy them separately or as part of an Elementary School Science Bundle (Sprout Labs, LLC) in the App Store.
This one is called Plants HD: This is called Butterfly HD:
I also found these YouTube videos and my Firsties loved them!
This one uses real footage but is told from the perspective of the egg/caterpillar/butterfly.
Materials:
Here's a few links to some Teachers Pay Teachers resources I used during this week of butterflies and life cycles. They were all very useful and effective for my Firsties!
This FREE (yay!) resources has 2 foldable readers about the life cycle of a butterfly - one with pictures and one for students to draw their own pictures! Also, there's a fun Butterfly Life Cycle Wheel Cut and Paste activity for your students to use as a personal anchor for learning.
Here's a couple of (FREE!) Butterfly Life Cycle Observation Templates by creator that we used to observe and record the stages of metamorphosis (we did three observations total).
Butterfly Life Cycle Observation Journal by creator Sarah Peters on Teachers Pay Teachers
Butterfly Life Cycle Observation Mini Book by Susan Jones - TGIF of Teachers Pay Teachers
And finally, here's an A W E S O M E Butterfly Life Cycle PowerPoint by creator Linda Post - The Teachers Post which has tons of great vocabulary, differentiated reading levels, and black and white versions for easier use. It costs $3.50 to download and is well worth it!
We Let Our Butterflies Go!
To end our week, we let one of our caterpillars-turned-butterflies go! Beforehand, we had a whole group discussion about some things we learned about why butterflies are good to have in gardens, and then decided to let the butterfly go near our gardens in hopes that it would stick around. Here are some photos of us setting our little friend free!
