Kindergartners to view monarchs' emergence
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Miracle of Birth |
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A monarch butterfly that emerged early. Nearly 100 are expected to emerge during the first few days of fall semester at David Lipscomb Elementary School. |
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Kindergarten teacher and citizen-scientist Becky Collins views several of the chrysalides from which monarch butterflies will soon emerge. The caterpillars shown are getting ready to shed their skins. |
Kindergarteners at David Lipscomb Elementary School will have the opportunity to observe one of nature's miracles soon after school begins Friday.
As many as 100 monarch butterflies are expected to emerge from their chrysalides in Becky Collins' kindergarten classroom at David Lipscomb, giving her new students a powerful hands-on lesson in the way the world works.
And it will be hands-on. Once the butterflies emerge, the students will have the special joy of getting to lick a lollipop in class, then rubbing some of the sugar on their fingers. The butterflies will sit on their fingers and eat the sugar before winging off to their winter destination in Mexico.
Collins uses her interest in monarch butterflies as an all-encompassing teaching tool. She says the butterflies are useful for teaching everything from biology and environmental sciences such as weather and seasons, to religion and multiculturalism.
"We use them in phonics and do a lot of math," Collins said. "We count butterflies, group them by male and female, make graphs, compare more than-less than. It's a good cross-curriculum example to use."
The kindergarteners will also make paper butterflies and send them to school children in Mexico as a way of participating in the southern migration of the monarchs, Collins said. Children in Mexico will reciprocate in the spring, sending their own creations to the David Lipscomb students as the butterflies start their way north.
That project serves as an opening to conversations about cross-cultural topics. The monarch is "almost a religious symbol for the Mexican people," Collins said. "So we talk about the celebrations that are connected with monarch butterflies and lifestyles in Mexico. Last year we incorporated learning Spanish, which we're doing school-wide this year."
Monarch butterflies migrate to a specific region in Mexico each year, a habitat that is shrinking because of the ongoing loss of the tropical rainforest.
"The phenomenon of their migration is something many scientists are working to preserve, and we 'citizen-scientists' are trying to help," Collins said.
The expansion of the Internet has created opportunities for interactions between scientists and citizens that did not exist before. Scientists can list the kinds of information they need, and people in many locations can respond with their observations.
Collins' interest in monarch butterflies led her to establish a "butterfly garden" behind her school building. The garden is rich in milkweed -- the only plant the butterflies will eat when they are still caterpillars -- and other flowers that serve as nectar plants for adult butterflies.
During the summer, Collins says she found more than 200 eggs on the milkweed plants. She took them into her classroom to protect them from predators and to make sure they had enough milkweed for nourishment.
In addition, Collins attended a local workshop this summer which was led by Dr. Karen Oberhauser, one of the leading monarch butterfly researchers at the University of Minnesota's Department of Ecology. Oberhouser did not want to take all her caterpillars home, so she distributed them among Collins and other area teachers to nurse into butterflies.
Not all the eggs progressed into caterpillars, which is normal. But between the home-grown caterpillars and those from the conference, about 100 chrysalides remaining in Collins' classroom for her new students to observe in the coming days.
"I get to say a lot, 'Isn't God cool?' I ask, 'Can you do that -- can you make a little egg turn into a caterpillar? Can you make that caterpillar turn into a butterfly? No, you can't. Only God can do that. So isn't God cool?'"