Butterfly Release Event!

A few weeks ago one of the library staff members asked me if we wanted a monarch caterpillar to raise in the library. I said yes! I thought it would be really fun and cool for the kids to get to see the stages, and I figured we could have a fun release event when it turned into a butterfly!

We actually had the little butterfly house leftover from years ago too, so it was perfect! This is what the setup looked like:

The kids LOVED it. I will 100% do this again in future years. They were always so psyched to come in and see whether the butterfly had moved on to its next life stage. I had tons of kids enter the “Name the Butterfly Contest”. It was my intention to have the library staff pick their favorite, but when I narrowed it down to the final 4, I just couldn’t choose. So I decided to hold off and let the kids who came to the release event after school to vote on the names! (More on that below).

I manged to not get a photo of the butterfly as a full chrysalis (despite her being like that for almost two weeks #LibrarianFail) but here is a photo of her as a caterpillar, JUST hanging to begin her chrysalis, and as a butterfly!

We had a second grade class in the library when the chrysalis hatched. Of course, I was on an errand in the school and I missed it. 😦 BUT I was SO glad that there were kids in here to see it happen! This whole time I was so nervous that she would hatch overnight and we wouldn’t be around to see it.

That was on Thursday Aug 29. The way I went about this program, was to advertise it for “the first week of September” and have people sign up, and then call them with the specifics when the butterfly hatched. This was a little earlier than I anticipated, but my actual problem was that Monday Sept 2 was Labor Day, so there was no school and the library was closed. In order to not keep the butterfly captive for the long weekend, the program HAD to be scheduled for the next day, Friday Aug 30.

So! On Thursday after school I called all the parents and let them know, and got started planning a program I thought I was going to have more time on!

We had 16 kiddos at this program, which was honestly phenomenal for such a last minute thing. We did two butterfly crafts and then we had our release event! First thing, I had them vote on a butterfly name. The options were:

• Cheeto
• Goldfish
• Venom
• Moose

Cheeto was the winner! (Name courtesy of some 3rd grade girls.)

Okay if you follow me blog posts you should know by now that I am a chronic mistake maker. Its how you learn! So, my mistake with this one was planning two crafts that were actually both really hard. It’s hard for me as an adult (and a crafty person) to gauge how difficult a craft really is sometimes, and this was one of those times! haha Here are the two crafts!

The first craft was a Butterfly Life Cycle Paper Toy. I thought this was SO fun and cool, and the kids did too but it turns out that folding so precisely was difficult for most of them.

So it’s find of like origami and when they turn the paper, the different stages of the butterfly’s life come together. So cool! But so hard haha I ended up folding a lot of them and especially taping them together at the end. Here are some photos of the kids doing them.

Our second craft was based on this butterfly craft. We printed half a butterfly on a sheet of orange paper and had the kids fold it in half to make sure the wings were symmetrical. After that, we had them cut veins in it, sort of like you would with a paper snowflake. That part was VERY confusing for several of the littler ones, and what made this one so difficult. Some butterflies had more lines than others, but that’s okay! They are all unique! Once they figured that part out, they glued their orange part onto a black piece of paper, and then cut the black paper to match the orange shape. After all that, they were given a paintbrush and some white paint, to give the butterfly some white dots around its edges. Here are some photos of the kiddos doing this craft:

We had to hurry through this craft so that we could do our release!! I am unable to add videos to this blog, but here is a link to the Facebook post about the program! There, you can see a video of the release event.

This one was a ton of fun and we will absolutely do it again!