Ending the Year in a Life Cycle Garden

As the end of the year draws near, it's always such a pleasure
to have our families visit one last time to see all of their student's
hard work and learning. Our end of year open house gives me the
chance to chat with them and let parents know how proud I am of
their student and all they have accomplished this year.

During our last quarter we spend a lot of time learning and
writing about life cycles.  At the end of the year it's all about frogs,
insects, and raising butterflies in our classrooom! Our parents
and students enjoyed last year's open house so much that we decided
to turn our hallway into a life cycle garden again!

During our butterfly unit we did lots of hands-on learning labs

and compiled all of our learning and writing into these butterfly booklets.

Students wrote butterfly haiku poetry and illustrated them

with watercolors.  The challenge here was to describe these

beautiful insects without using the word "butterfly". 

We displayed them with our foldable flower booklets

made during our study of the life cycle of plants.

We had been learning about Vincent Van Gogh's 

sunflower paintings so several students decided

to make their booklets into sunflowers.

You can see all of our plant activities in this post and

view the plant resource I used.

While learning about a frog's life cycle we added key facts

about each stage to our charts.  I like to make my own shapes

into a sticky note with removable glue sticks.

We read lots of informational books about frogs and took notes.

We wrote about each stage of the frog's life cycle

inside these little lily pad mini-books, added some beads for 

the eggs and made this life cycle writing craft 

to display in our garden.

I saved these cloud types writing and weather idioms from 

earlier in the year.

My kids loved turning themselves into butterfly kids!

My kids are such hams and love it when they get

to use pictures of themselves!

We added fan folded tissue paper to our pictures and wrote 

about what we would do if we were beautiful butterflies!

 I love all of the unit vocabulary they included in their writing!

You can download a free copy of this craft 

{HERE} or by clicking on the pictures.

I'm always a little sad when it's time to take it all down

because I love it when our hallway is

filled to the brim with life, learning, and this much cuteness!

But on the other hand, taking everything down means

it's almost summer break!