Butterfly Life Cycle Project

Last summer and early fall we did a unit on insects. Both my children enjoy hands on projects of various kinds so we tried to incorporate several projects since we weren't also doing all of our normal subjects as well.  When my daughter found the idea for this project in Pack O Fun magazine she decided we needed to try it.

We made a few changes to personalize the project.  It was originally supposed to be a monarch lifecycle, but they wanted to make their butterflies more colorful, so they just made generic butterflies.  Yes, I realize the butterflies probably don't resemble any known species, but I am okay with that. The instructions called for polymer clay that required baking in an oven but I really didn't want to have to open windows for ventilation or turn on the oven when the temperatures were in the 90's.  So when I discovered a polymer clay which was air dry we decided to go with that.

They each had fun making all the little pieces out of clay and talking about how they would arrange them on the foam core board. Then they decided that white was too boring so they needed to pain their backgrounds. Finally after several days the pieces were all dry and the kiddos could arrange and glue their creations together. I made the labels using my word processing program on the computer.

Here are the final results:

Daughters' Butterfly Lifecycle

Sons' Butterfly Lifecycle

They both had a lot of fun making them and using polymer clay for the first time.  They were pleased with the way the plaques turned out and I was too. Now if I was just a little more prompt in getting pictures on the computer!