Each May my school holds a celebration of learning where our students showcase their hard work and much of what they have learned. This year for our end of year open house my teammates and I turned our hallway into a life cycle garden. Our classes spend much of the last quarter learning about life cycles and insects. We studied the life cycles of frogs, plants, bees and of course butterflies!
We incorporated a lot of writing…
This one made me giggle…
“If I was a butterfly……I would fly on to my sister’s door and listen to my sister on the phone.” Ha!
This one made my teacher heart happy! I love it when kiddos use the vocabulary they’ve learned in their writing!
We made these little caterpillars to illustrate the stages of a butterfly’s life cycle.
My teammate made this butterfly writing craft with her class.
These were a HUGE hit! We turned ourselves into butterflies to go with our writing. My kids LOVE it when they get touse pictures of themselves!
I took pictures of each of my kiddos then had them cut them out. I gave each student about a 6″ by 8″ piece of tissue paper to fan fold, then we stapled them to the back of the photo. So simple, easy and FUN!
My awesome teammate made this honeycomb with her class to showcase their writing about bees. We’ve been working with our students on learning to take notes while reading nonfiction as well as watching video clips. BrainPop Jr. and Discovery Streaming are perfect for this and we’re lucky to have both!
What’s a garden without sunshine? We made these arrays of sunshine from my friend Amanda Madden’s FAB-U-LOUS blog Teaching Maddeness!
We also made butterfly life cycle booklets to showcase all of our learning. I’ve wanted to pull our butterfly activities together into a unit for my TPT Shop for a while now. I’d love to make a companion to my Plant Life Cycle unit and I’ve been tweaking this one for two years. I just can’t quite get it to be the way I want it yet!
These are some of the things we did while learning about the frog life cycle.
I posted a few weeks ago about these little guys. You can see that post HERE.
I love it when our families come to visit. It’s so much fun to see them enjoying all of things their child is learning about!
Well, I’m over and out! I hope you all have some rest, relaxation and most of all, some fun planned for the summer!
I love the honey comb you made. We are learning about bees can you tell me how you made those, or do you have a template you'd be willing to share?
This is all so beautiful! Look at all that awesome learning! I am going to attempt to make that honeycomb for our classroom door for open house! So many neat ideas! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Kelli
Tales of a Teacher
Seriously Linda – those butterflies are brilliant…I love the hand antennas! All the life cycles are cute as well. Love it all my friend.
Vicky
Teaching and Much Moore
How cute are those butterflies!!??
Jennifer
First Grade Blue SKies
Your hallway looks wonderful! The families must have been impressed.
Yes, please! Your kiddos will love it! Mine get such a kick out of using pictures of themselves in our projects!
Those butterflies are too cute! Stealing the idea for the future. 🙂