Tot School: Butterflies

For a little scissor challenge this week I printed out a whole pile of fruit clip art images for Miss Madelynn to practice with. Most of these shapes are too hard for her to cut out exactly, but since she tends to be a bit of a perfectionist (hmmm, wonder where she got that from…) I thought it would be good for her to work on just “trying her best.” After a bit of frustration with not being able to do it perfectly, she settled in to cutting close to the lines and being happy with that. Of course our little hungry caterpillar friend was cheering her on the whole time 😉

I was inspired by the cute little hole punches in The Very Hungry Caterpillar and knew they would make for a great lacing activity.  I printed out clip art to match the story, hole punched them and Madelynn laced the pieces together to tell the story in order.

Dot stampers are a great go to fine motor activity. I love how easy it is to spice up a plain old coloring page with bright beautiful dots. I printed a few of these butterfly outlines and let Madelynn design her own butterflies. Easy Peasy!

Beads + pipe cleaners = amazing fine motor creations.  To create these butterflies we used 2 pipe cleaners. After Madelynn nearly filled them with beads, we twisted each side into a large oval with a little bit extra left for the antenna/body.  Then we twisted each oval in the center to create the upper and lower wing for each side.  Using the small piece of pipe cleaner in the center we added one bead on each side for a spacer and then twisted them together to connect both sides and create antennas.

To stamp these little cuties, I attached pom poms to clothespins, and gave Madelynn 2 small cups of paint.  We dipped, stamped and repeated all over the page to create crawly little hungry caterpillars.

For me one of the best ways to remember something new is by acting it out, so we acted out each part of the butterfly life cycle.  We started out curling up in a little ball for the egg. Then we crawled on our tummies like caterpillars. Next, we hid in our chrysalis staying very still.  Last we emerged as  butterfly flapping our wings and flying around the room.

  For this activity I printed purple, pink, and yellow butterflies and scattered them around the room. Then I labeled 3 buckets with color words for sorting.  We took turns running back and forth with one butterfly at a time and sorted it into the correct bucket until all of the butterflies were caught.

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