Learning about Monarch Butterflies

One fond school memory my older children have is raising butterflies. We bought a special kit, ordered our caterpillars and watched the magnificent change take place. My younger girls have been asking if they can have butterflies this year. As soon as the weather gets warmer, we will be ordering a new group of butterflies to observe. While we are waiting though, we started to learn all about these wonderful creatures by watching  Your Backyard: The Monarch Butterfly from Crowe's Nest Media.

Crowe's Nest media is a company run by a homeschooling family. They aim to produce nature videos that show God's marvelous creation.The Monarch video is a semi-finalist in the upcoming San Antonio Independent Christian Film festival for Best Documentary Film and Best Creation Film. That is quite an accomplishment!

We have studied about butterflies before and I thought I knew my stuff. I was pleasantly surprised at how much new information I learned about Monarchs! I had no idea about instar caterpillar stages, the difference between Monarchs and Painted Ladies, and that Monarch butterflies could be tagged.

The DVD is high-quality and presents the information in an interesting yet fun manner. All my children ages 3yrs. to 13yrs. enjoyed watching this video. I love that Crowe's Nest media showed how God wonderfully crafted these creatures. The images were stunning and I was so impressed with the children narrating the DVD. This is an awesome Christian science/nature-study resource to have-- and share with others.

After we watching the video a couple of times, we pulled out our Christian Kids Explore Science book and read more about butterflies. In the book it had a great idea of creating a butterfly life-cycle mobile---which we did. We talked about the many things we learned in the video.

Here's a closer view of the caterpillar---we think he turned out cute!

Oh no! We got a patchwork butterfly instead of a Monarch! :)

Crowe's Nest Media is in the process of finishing a downloadable study guide to go along with the Monach butterfly DVD. The study guide is designed to help children integrate the contents of the DVD and to further their learning. It will include content review, discussion questions, copy work pages for various ages, coloring pages, and opportunities for further study. There will also be notebooking pages so that children can create a "monarch" keepsake notebook. I'm looking forward to using this resource with my kids.

Your Backyard Monach DVD $19.95

If you purchase the DVD now and use coupon code : SpellOutLoud you will get the study guide download free when it is available (roughly a $9.00 value) plus $1 off the initial purchase. This code is good until Friday, Feb. 3, 2012 (feel free to share this code with others!)

Crowe's Nest Media is letting me giveaway 1 DVD to one of you! But wait--- there are also other bloggers giving away a copy of this wonderful DVD. Just visit each of the following blogs below for another chance to win.

*To enter, sign-in on the Rafflecopter widget. You can use your Facebook account, or under that big button is a sign-in with email link. Rafflecopter and SpellOutloud do not collect this contact information. It is only to notify winners.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Visit these blogs to see their reviews and another chance at winning a DVD:

The Curriculum Choice
Finding Joy
Handbook of Nature Study
Mama's Learning Corner
The Traveling Praters
Get Along Home
Feels Like Home


Disclosure: I received this DVD and the giveaway copy in exchange for a review. The opinions stated are mine. I also will receive a small affiliate commission if you purchase the DVD using the coupon code listed above. Thank you in advance for supporting this site.

Learning about Monarch Butterflies

Getting Ready for Nursery Rhyme Time

Starting in Feb. I will be posting Nursery Rhyme activities both here and on Totally Tots on Thursdays. Nursery rhymes are a wonderful way to introduce young learners to rhymes and develop phonemic awareness. Did you know that it is a skill to hear words that rhyme? I have been working on getting things ready for this unit and thought it might be helpful to list some of my thoughts and resources that I will be using.

The Books:




There are many different collections and version of Nursery Rhymes. I will mainly be using classic nursery rhymes. If you haven't read any nursery rhymes for awhile, you might want to pre-read the book versions you will be using. Some of those classic poems might be too harsh or violent (i.e. certain version of the Old Woman in the Shoe say,"She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed," while other versions say, "She gave them all kisses and sent them to bed.")

The Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme book by Scott Gustafson is a beautiful, hardback book. The pictures are gorgeous! I'm tempted to tear them out and frame them. My children love to look at the pictures in this book. I do want to point out that one poem included in the book, the Bat, Bat poem, has a picture of a wizard catching a bat.

My Very First Mother Goose is another good beginning collection. Wonderful illustrations. Some of the standard nursery rhymes are missing such as Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Best Mother Goose Ever by Richard Scarry is the book I grew up listening to when I was a kid. Typical Richard Scarry style illustrations.

Sylvia Long's Mother Goose is another collection that has good reviews on Amazon. I don't own this version yet but hope to add it to our collection soon.

This week I've been printing off nursery rhyme poem pages and sequence cards. Each week I will introduce a new poem (or two) and we will add the poem to our Nursery Rhyme notebooks. Any crafts and other misc. things will also be placed in the notebook. I plan on using the sequence cards in our pocket chart for retelling the rhyme. I will probably be printing off pages from Kizclub too. There are word cards plus coloring pages. Some of the full color pages could be printed on magnet paper and used for retelling.

I also gathered up various odds and ends that go with different rhymes. We will use those objects for retelling and games.

For those who are wondering what rhymes I will be doing--- well I never know for sure but here is a partial list to start:

Little Bo Peep
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
Twinkle, Twinkle
Hey Diddle, Diddle
Jack and Jill
Jack Be Nimble
Little Jack Horner
Hickory Dickory Dock

I've also been collecting Nursery Rhyme ideas on my Pinterest board. If you have any great nursery rhyme links, leave it in the comments so I can add it.

Pin It

Getting Ready for Nursery Rhyme Time

Lego Learning and More

I've been enjoying using Instagram on my iPad. Though not as convenient as an iPhone, I still love the instant way to share photos with others. Here are some photos from the past week and a half:

Pictures 1, 2, and 4: My son has been on a huge Lego kick this month. He has confiscated any sort of bins/bowls/drawers for sorting his collection by color. He even set up a way to photograph his creations using white foam core board and my craft light. He would love to get a stop-motion camera and start creating Lego movies too. He came up with the Noah creation after our history readings this past week. He now tells me he wants to get a bunch of the Roman Lego mini-figures so he can recreate even more history lessons. Yeah, I won't fall for that one---lol! Every day I have to make sure he's actually doing his school work and not just building, but I do love that he is being creative and learning new skills (such as photographing and photo-editing).

Picture 3: We got our brand new WriteShop Junior D curriculum in the mail this week. I will be using this with my 9yr. old daughter. I glanced through it and am so excited to start! We will start on Monday and I'll be sharing my opinions on the program next month.

Picture 5: One of the many science experiments we did this week and half just for fun.

Picture 6:  Each of my kids has their own clipboards. My little girls especially love theirs. When we are doing "school" each of them clip papers and either draw or color while we are reading or talking about things. They tell me they are doing their school work too :)

Picture 7: My girlfriends and I made a double-batch of The Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls. Boy are these good!! I don't think I would have ever made these on my own because when I first read the instructions I was overwhelmed. But it really isn't that hard. Now I feel like I can try these on my own. :)

Picture 8: I know I've shared about my Borsa Bell iPad bag before. I started carrying my bag around as a purse and it was too small for all the extras I needed, so I upgraded to the large Hobo iPad bag--picking the same fabric as before. I LOVE IT! It fits my iPad, wallet, Kindle (if I had one) makeup, diapers, and more!

Picture 9: I've been planning our week, our co-op class for Feb. and a nursery rhyme unit (to be coming up soon).

How was your week?

Linking up with:

Camera Phone Friday hostess Dawn Camp @ My Home Sweet Home

Weekly Wrap-Up hostess Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers 

Collage Friday with Mary at Home Grown Learners

Lego Learning and More

Fun with Science

This past week I pulled out various science books and we went through and picked out experiments to try. Do you know how freeing that was? We picked them out to do them for fun! No learning objectives other than what the kids observed on their own. Here are a few that we did:

Static Electricity:

With the air being so dry in my house right now, I knew this would be the perfect time to have some fun with static electricity. It never gets old seeing hair stick up on end or secretively trying to stick a balloon on someone's back. We had lots of fun and giggles with this one.

Baking Soda and Vinegar Reactions:

We blew up a balloon using vinegar and baking soda! An easy way to observe a chemical reaction and bi-products of that reaction.

Sedimentary Rock Building:

What? This doesn't look like science? Well we made this creation to demonstrate sedimentary rocks! This recipe is found in Christian Kids Explore Science Earth and Science book.

Neutrons, Protons, Electrons Oh My!

My 9 yr. old and 12yr. old worked on building an atomic model and models of H2O and O2 molecules from Styrofoam balls. We followed the directions found in Christian Kids Explore Science: Chemistry book.

Observing Nature in the Comfort of my Home:

I also got this awesome DVD in the mail from Crowe's Nest Media. Oh it makes me wish spring was near! I'll be writing in more detail about it next week along with other bloggers and we'll be giving away a couple DVD's too.

Fun with Science