Buggy about Life Cycles!

To wrap up our animal unit, we learned all about insects and life cycles! I used activities from my Insect/Life cycle unit if you are interested! We had already learned about insects back in kindergarten so we reviewed insects and did a sort in our science journals. The kids remembered lots of great characteristics such as six legs, three body parts, lays eggs, etc. They also remembered that a spider is not an insect!

We then read books on insects and learned facts about different insects we were interested in. The kids then wrote 2 or 3 facts in their own insect books. They really enjoyed going to our classroom library to read insect books to use to find facts. Yay for research! :)

 To move on to life cycles, we started with the life cycle of a butterfly. In their science journals the kids illustrated the missing stage (pupa) and labeled all the stages. We also talked about the life cycle of a frog and did a similar activity but I forgot to take a picture! :)

 After talking about animal life cycles, we talked about how we have a life cycle also. The kids illustrated their own "I Grow and Change" books:

 

 

 

At the beginning of the second week of our unit, I sent home a note asking parents to send in three pictures with their student (one of their child as a baby, one of them as a toddler and one of them now). I even showed them baby/toddler/kid pictures of myself and they LOVED THEM! I included some below so you could see :) 

 

I was so cute....what happened?? haha :) On Thursday, we used these pictures to write stories of what we were like at each stage of our life. The kids wrote what they looked like and could do at each age and drew a picture of the photograph they brought. Then they wrote a story about that time in their life. Here are a few examples:

 

 

The kids really enjoyed learning about life cycles! We raised caterpillars last year so I didn't do it again....I wish I had taken pictures! I will try to remember to do that next year! :)

We are about done with our Texas unit so I will have that up soon! And believe it or not we only have 9 school days left so we are right in the middle of our countdown to summer fun! Stay tuned for pictures!