Butterflies

My eagerness to do more home school was tempered by reality a bit this week.  I've started working a few nights a week, which makes mornings a little rougher.  Plus, just life and general busy-ness happens and - anyway, we're three weeks in and finding a nice pace, I think.

It took us two weeks to get through our butterfly projects.  L is still loving it.  Here are a few of our projects:

 Again with the cutting and gluing and learning names of things.  Still one of my favorite things.

I loved this project inspired by this tutorial. We spent some time looking at our Butterflies and Moths Golden Guide (we have an older version, and the illustrations in the golden guides are excellent).  L picked our favorites, then I helped her draw their markings, and she colored them.  That was exciting enough for her, but I especially loved the collection-style display. 

We also made a butterfly feeder using this tutorial, but I didn't really have a good place to put it, and we never saw any butterflies come to it.  Our hummingbird feeders, on the other hand, are pretty well established and we caught sight of several butterflies there.  L helped me make the butterfly food (which is sugar water, just like hummingbird food, but diluted a bit more), and we drank a little in teacups.  Talking about nectar was a nice segue from our flower study, and she thought drinking the nectar was way cool, even if it was almost too sweet.  

We both really enjoyed looking up the butterflies in our books (besides the Golden Guides, we also love our Audubon Society Field Guide).  Maybe me more. I'm not sure that she remembers many of the butterflies' names, but she remembers that we identify them by their markings and the plants they like, which is exciting to see.