Pre-School's Life Cycle Of A Butterfly

Over the last couple of months the children in Pre School at Daisykins nursery in Rugby have been learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. They started off with 5 pet caterpillars and the children jointly decided to call them Catty, Freddie, Lily, Chris and Ja'crispy. The children watched them grow and enjoyed listening to the story "The Hungry Caterpillar" and talking about it during circle time. As they grew bigger the children enjoyed using different coloured pencils to draw their interpretations of them.

After about a month the children were then able to watch their pet caterpillars spin themselves into chrysalises and practitioners moved them from the pod that they had arrived in to a small mesh tent to start the next part of their journey. The practitioners asked the children what had happened to them, one child said "They've built themselves a home" and another said "They've gone to sleep to become beautiful butterflies".

After waiting patiently for a couple more weeks the children were pleasantly surprised when the chrysalises started to hatch into butterflies. The children enjoyed watching them hatch one by one and counted as well as talking about the different colours that were on their wings. The children also drew pictures of the butterflies at this stage of their cycle. During this time the children gave the butterflies apples to feed off of and watched them fly around the tent. Finally after roughly a week when all 5 caterpillars had turned into butterflies the children took them to the garden and set them free into there natural habitat.

Here at Daisykins nursery in Rugby practitioners are passionate about giving the children an opportunity to see life cycles in real life form as well as looking at books and talking about them. They were able to incorporate different areas of the children's learning into this topic and promote their development in different areas.