The monarchs are migrating right through our area this week. My 3rd grader had a ton of questions about them since we’ve been seeing them everywhere. So I put together a small “All About Monarchs” learning activity for him.
We started by watching this short video from National Geographics Kids
We talked briefly about a butterfly life cycle. He has learned this before so we did not spend a lot of time on it, but if this is new to your child, this free printable mini book from The Primary Post is a great resource.
My son loves Lego, so I challenged him to use Lego to show the Monarch life cycle. This idea came from Frugal Fun For Boys.
After this I told him that we were going to become research scientists. I explained that scientists spend a lot of time researching a learning about a subject, once they have learned some things they can start asking questions that will help them discover new information. We talked about how to do searches online and how to look for information that is reputable.
We then did this worksheet I created as a follow up for learning more about monarchs and researching. You can download it for free below!
We followed this up by visiting the Baker Wetlands near us where many monarchs like to roost, usually this area run by the University has tagging days where you can help tag the monarchs for research, unfortunately COVID has cancelled them for this year. We also visited a local park just as the sun was coming up to see the butterflies getting ready to leave the trees they were roosting on. We always have luck with parks that have a pond near a good group of trees.