Life Cycles

We began the day with a review game. There were picture cards on the table of all sorts of things. We asked the kids to find one nonliving thing, one plant, one invertebrate, and one vertebrate. The kids did great recognizing each of the groups we had previously studied.

Next we met on the rug to introduce the topic: life cycles. We talked about how people grow from babies to adults, but even as babies we look the same as adults. We have eyes, ears, noses, arm legs, they are just smaller. The we talked about how some animals go through big changes as they grow. They look completely different in the first stages of their life compared to when they are adults. The two animals we focused on today were frogs and butterflies.

First, we read a book about the frog life cycle called ribbit by Jorey Hurley and watched a video that showed a frog in various stages of the life cycle. Hidden around the room were pictures of the 5 stages of a frog's life cycle. They found the picture and had to put them in the right order. We played with plastic hopping frogs and acted like frogs ourselves trying to jump over a pretend river.

Second, we read the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and watched a video of butterflies in various stages of their life cycle. Some kids commented that they have watched this life cycle in an enclosure at preschool or home. The kids completed an art project with noodles to show each of the stages of a butterfly. Then we got active again, using toilet paper we wrapped up all the kids in a chrysalis and had them emerge as butterflies. We used ribbons as wings and fluttered around the room and played Simon Says where we had to flap our wings fast, slow, high, low etc.

Pictures for the day are below.