Off to Africa to Survive!

Off to Africa - Survival

Well it is finally that time to start my trip to the continent of Africa. I am so excited to share my experience with all of you. Before this trip I went to China, Tibet, and Nepal. I will post a little about that in a future post.

Future travelers, your first lesson to learn from me is that nothing ever goes according to plan. You must plan to be flexible and figure things out. After leaving Kathmandu, Nepal and coming upon my first layover in Dubai, UAE I have found out that my bags are not on the plane. They were left behind due to weight restrictions. 

So what does that mean?

For between the next 4-8 days I have only the clothes on my back, a camera, a story book on Rwanda, a passport, and some credit cards. The rest of the essentials including Malaria medicine, sleeping bag, all of my clothes, and toiletries will not be joining me for who knows how long.

Lucky for you I still have my iPad to post and my good spirit. Let's see how this turns out! Miss P is still ready to venture into the jungle

Butterfly Release

 Butterfly Release

Boy oh boy these kids took a liking to the butterfly project. Every day these little ones came running in the school and would clamber around the cage and take note on any of the changes in their cups or the chrysalises. I could go on and on about this project. It was by far my favorite unit I have ever developed over my four years of teaching. I will do a post later about the projects we did during the unit but here I want to share the pictures of our butterfly release. We were fortunate enough to take part in the community and the 1st and 3rd grade took a walk to the local park to release the butterflies in their garden. My 2 year old nephew joined the class in the excitement! Take a look!

My nephew and I opened the cage as the students watched eagerly!

 

Some lucky kids had the butterflies land on their hands!

Butterfly Art

 

Who doesn't love to look at butterflies? They are such beautiful creatures and have captivated me since I was a young girl. Growing up I loved finding them and was always sad to find a dead butterfly. One day while I was walking down a street market in Thailand I came across a beautiful pair of butterfly earrings. What a great way to keep the beauty of a butterfly.

Flash forward a few years and here I am teaching First Grade Science. To my delight this year I got to teach all about butterflies. I was thrilled to get started. Thanks to the help of a few donors and grants we got to create an insane butterfly unit! I used some of my own collections to show the students the art of preserving butterflies. 

Gorgeous right? The students learned about where the butterflies came from, different traits, and why they had adopted their markings. 

The next part of the project was to pick our own butterfly wings and create our own artwork. Each child got one wing, piece of cardstock, and lots of markers.

Together I gave them ideas for drawing the grass, hills, flowers, sun, and much more. They drew them with black markers and then scribbled in with the highlighters. By coloring them in with strokes instead of a solid color it gave them and artistic look!

Here is an example of the one I created and below some student examples. To seal them we used a Scotch laminator to seal them in tight and keep them safe for years to come!