Butterfly Art

In the fall, during wooly bear season, I shared a fun caterpillar craft. That would have been a fun activity that would have more of a creative element than the following activities, but since we still have that caterpillar hanging on our fridge, I decided to choose a craft activity that encompasses the entire life cycle of a butterfly. Although it is less open ended, it demonstrates all four stages of a butterfly's life in a way that kids identify with and find fun.

We created a diagram of a butterfly's life cycle by using pasta!

We used four different shapes to represent each stage. Ditalini for the eggs, penne for the caterpillars, shells for the chrysalis, and farfalle (bowtie) for the butterflies!

I used a green marker to divide a piece of printer paper into four rectangles, and labeled each section with the appropriate stage. I also drew a leaf in three of the sections, and clouds and the sun in the section for the butterflies. Older kids can do this step themselves, or you can use cut outs for your child to glue on by themselves.

I got a book that Jonah is very familiar with, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and we went through the book talking about when the caterpillar was an egg, a caterpillar, a cocoon, and a butterfly. I was impressed that Jonah was able to name each stage while talking about the story. 

After having him identify the stage, I asked him which pasta was shaped like that. For example when we read "In the light of the moon, an egg lay on a leaf" in the book, I asked him "What is he first? What is that? An egg! Which pasta looks like the egg?" He was pretty able to identify what the shapes were meant to resemble. He then colored the shape with markers.

Then he used glue to place the pasta on the diagram.

We repeated this for all of the stages, continuing to follow the book as our guide to a butterfly's life. Jonah really enjoyed the "game" of matching the shape of pasta to what the character in the book was doing.

When Jonah was finished, we reviewed all of the stages, then set the picture aside for the glue to dry. When Daryl came home, Jonah was so excited and proud to show his Daddy what he had made, and what he learned about how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly!