mariposa

Last night we read the Enki nature story, "Mariposa" (Spanish for butterfly), about the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, while sitting by a crackling fire, eating popcorn. (I love homeschooling!!) This morning we recalled the story (J is doing really great with his story summaries!), and then did a drawing from the story. We used new drawing pads, which I identified as our "science good books" to the kids to try to differentiate between the Fairy Tale led drawings we do in our Language Arts good book and the types of drawings we will do for nature stories. I told them they could either draw what I draw, or anything else they wanted to, or could use my drawing to get ideas from. I also told them we would not be looking for hidden letters in our Science drawings. So this first photos is mine, depicting the life stages of a Monarch, and a field of orange butterflies.

J chose to follow fairly closely with what I was doing, and here is his creation. He drew all the same components as mine, although his technique varied a bit from mine. He commented that he liked to draw butterflies by using two triangles, and I found it interesting that he chose to draw purple butterflies rather than orange, especially since he was a stickler to make sure our larger Monarch was orange and black.

Zoo Boy struck out on his own from the start. He started with a big "X" in the middle of the page. Then he drew a circle around it, then put a dot in each quarter-circle. At that point he looked over to see what I was doing, and I was just drawing in the egg on my leaf. He declared his dots to be butterfly eggs, then immediately drew a caterpillar, then a chrysalis, then a butterfly -- all one step ahead of me. When I was working on my butterflies in the field, he added some grass at the bottom of his drawing, asking to borrow the light green crayon he saw me using. J and I were done with our drawings while Zoo Boy put the finishing touches on his. He was very proud of his work.

Now we're off to spend the afternoon at Magic Wings, the butterfly conservatory in Deerfield, MA. Hopefully we'll get a chance to see butterflies at all 4 stages of development! And I know, from visiting there in the past, that we'll get the experience of standing in a field of butterflies!