Monarch Migration

Here is another great project borrowed from my wonderful art teacher friend in Appleton.  I did this project with my third grade classes and it went very well.  The kids not only learned a lot, but the final product was also quite impressive.

I started with a slide show and lots of fun facts about monarch butterflies and their amazing migration to the forests of Mexico.  Students would be making their own monarchs in this project, but not just one, we were sticking to the migration theme so each student would end up making four and had the choice to keep them all or they could pick their three favorites and discard the fourth.  We started by learning about warm and cool colors.  Students could choose whether they wanted all their butterflies to be warm colors or cool colors.  I showed them how to use pastel chalks to blend one color into another and students blended as many warm or cool colors as they wanted on four 6"x6" pieces of paper.

After blending was complete, we talked about symmetry and asymmetry.  I showed students how to fold each colored paper so that each side was symmetrical.  I had printed off a few pictures of monarch butterflies and their wings so they would have a reference to work off of.  We then took black paint and a small brush to start painting our symmetrical butterflies.  I showed students how to paint only on one side of the folded line and then fold the paper over to create a perfectly symmetrical wing.  They thought that this was very cool and loved doing it, every time they unfolded it they looked in disbelief.  After painting all four butterflies in black, I gave out white paint and we added accent marks and dots.

We made sky backgrounds with clouds and cut out our butterflies.  I showed them how you could glue down both wings to have a flat butterfly, glue down one wing to have a turning butterfly, or glue down just the body to have a butterfly in mid stroke.  These turned out beautifully and the kids were very proud of all their hard work.