Butterflies!

On Wednesday nights right now Emily and I have been having a blast doing a Kid's program called God's World Adventure Camp. We are trying to teach about different aspects of God while doing a lot of learning about the world He made. We have also been bringing in Bible stories that go along with the lesson.

This past Wednesday we talked about "God guides me. I will follow." I told about how God guided Abram after God told him to move but didn't tell him where he was going. I also taught from some verses that talk about God guiding us. Then Emily told about Monarch butterflies and how in the summer time they go to various parts of our nation and have babies and then when fall comes they all fly south to this one particular spot in Mexico. Scientists are perplexed as to how in the world they all know where to go (especially the babies who have never been there before) but it doesn't seem like a huge puzzle to us. God made them and He directs them.

As part of our program we have some monarch caterpillars that we are raising and watching turn into butterflies (Here is a post that explains how we have done it before). After they come out of the chrysalis we are hoping to tag them.

Some of the other fun things we did were:

:: Made a picture of the life cycle of a butterfly using fingerprints.

:: Watched a slide show with pictures of the monarchs and what they do and the place in Mexico.

:: Made yummy butterfly snacks. We used Ritz crackers and spread cream cheese on them (I planned on bringing peanut butter as another option but I forgot) and then we had all sorts of choices to use to make butterflies on them.

For bodies we had:

• Carrot sticks
• Pretzel sticks
• Raisins
• Thick chives pieces

For wings we had:

• Heart shaped cheese slices
• Almond slices
• Little lettuce leaves
• Apple slices
• Strawberry slices
• Radish slices
• Cucumber slices
• Apricot slices

For antennae we had:

• Chives
• Carrot slivers

We also had sunflower seeds available for using.

Both kids and teachers had a lot of fun creating beautiful butterflies. It was a pretty healthy snack too! I got my idea for the snack here.

Some of the other things we had hoped to do but ran out of time were:

• Give the kids a lightweight scarf (to be their wings) and then wrap them up in old connected computer paper (we have a bunch of it at the church building, where I read about this idea they used toilet paper but we had more computer paper on hand) like being in a chrysalis and then we would turn on music and they could slowly break out of their chrysalis and wave their wings to dry them off and then "fly"!
• Give them juice in a cup that would represent a flower and then let them suck it out with a straw like butterflies suck nectar out of flowers. (The problem here was that I forgot the straws.)
• Play a game where part of the kids would be butterflies and would have to get from one location (one side of the parking lot) to another without getting hit by a car, eaten by a bird or any of the other many things that can happen to butterflies while they are trying to migrate. (The car, bird etc would be other kids and they would tag the butterflies so that they wouldn't make it.)

We had lots of fun studying about butterflies and I hope this inspires you to enjoy learning about them more too!