Project Summary

“Monarch Migration - Destination: Mexico” is an Inquiry Based unit of study I designed to help my Kindergarten students understand the mysterious and wonderful journey that Monarch Butterflies make each year to Mexico. The Monarch Migration unit is included in a yearlong theme in my classroom so that my students will be able to experience, explore, and compare life cycles and seasonal destinations of various animals living or passing through Indiana.

The goal of this unit was to excite my students about the Monarch Butterfly, its body structure, where it lives, how it grows and changes, what it eats, and what it does to get ready for seasonal changes. I also wanted to impress upon them the importance of caring for our environment, focusing specifically on milkweed plants, the plant that Monarch caterpillars eat before building a chrysalis.

The children and I looked at pictures of Monarch Butterflies, searched for them on our school grounds, and made many different representations concerning the stages of their growth and development. As we explored our unit together, my students were able to identify the parts of a Monarch Butterfly; “proboscis” was their favorite word, demonstrate their knowledge of the life cycle through many different representations, and participate in a balloon launch to illustrate the idea of migration.

Learner Outcomes:At the end of my unit my Kindergarten students will be able to:

1) Identify a Monarch Butterfly and name 5 body parts (abdomen, thorax, proboscis, antenna, and wings).

2) Tell how a monarch travels and to where it migrates in the fall.3) Create (using representations) and orally tell the steps of a Monarch

Butterfly’s metamorphosis.

Project Description-Background Information

“ Monarch Migration - Destination: Mexico” is a unit that began during the summer of 2007. Our school ESL teacher and I signed up for a workshop that was being offered in our township as a partnership with Purdue University, dealing with Inquiry Based Science Themes and the 5E model, (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate). As we had time to plan together, we decided it would be beneficial to both of our classrooms of students if we planned a unit that integrated content standards in science and allowed our students to make cultural connections. I wanted to incorporate life cycles of various animals into the yearlong theme of my classroom We also had come across a website called JourneyNorth.org, that was full of information about Monarch Butterflies and their migration to Mexico. And so the journey began…

Introducing the UnitEngage-Day 1Objective: The learner will be able to use questioning and reasoning to determine what is in the Mystery Box.

I used a Mystery Box to introduce the “Monarch Migration” unit to my students. A Mystery Box is an inquiry tool used to help children ask good questions and to analyze the answers they are given to help them guess what is inside. Inside the box I put a Monarch caterpillar puppet and a copy of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I explained to the students how to play a Kindergarten version of 20 Questions. I was surprised at how few questions it took for the students to guess what was in the Mystery Box. I took the puppet out of the box and explained to the children that we were going to be learning about Monarch Butterflies. The first question they asked me was, “What’s a Monarch Butterfly?” I then decided that in order to answer all of their questions, I would need to make a KWL chart. There are three columns on a KWL chart; the K stands for What we KNOW, the W stands for What we WANT to know, and the L stands for What we LEARNED. The students knew very little about the Monarch Butterfly. The children knew that Monarchs had wings, a body, and a few pointed out the antenna, but they mainly just listed physical characteristics they were seeing on my puppet. The list of things the children wanted to know, however, was very long—we almost needed to add more paper! The children were very interested in knowing the names of the body parts on a Monarch Butterfly, as well as what they ate, where they live, and how they travel. They were also interested in the physical features of the Monarch and wanted to know what the black lines and white dots were for, and why Monarchs in some pictures had two larger black rectangles on their wing. You can see the KWL chart in the picture, before the “L” column was completed. This became my driving force in how I would shape the rest of the unit. We also used The Very Hungry Caterpillar as our Big Book focus for the week, and on this day, we took a picture walk through the book before reading it so that the children could come up with much of the rich vocabulary on

their own. During a picture walk the children take turns telling me what they see happening on each of the pages. After the picture walk, we then read the story together and checked to see if our picture walk predictions were correct. I also sat down for a short time with each student and asked them 5 questions relating to my learner outcomes for this unit. I created a rubric for scoring (see below)

Engage-Day 2Objective: The learner will be able to name the four stages of a Monarch Butterflies’ lifecycle and define “metamorphosis”. The learner will also be able to name 5 parts of a Monarch Butterflies’ body (antenna, wings, proboscis, abdomen, thorax).

We continued reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and used flannel board pictures to help sequence the story. This helped us incorporate some of our math sequencing skills into our literacy time. I also introduced a book titled Becoming Butterflies. The book is written from the point of view of a student and his experiences while watching the lifecycle of a Monarch Butterfly take place in his classroom. We were able to return to our KWL chart and answer some of our “W” questions. We found out that a butterflies’ tongue is called a proboscis, and that they really have four wings and not two. We also discovered that the lifecycle process of a Monarch Butterfly is called a metamorphosis, and that a Monarch Butterfly actually takes 4 different forms during its year long life span (egg, larva/pupa, caterpillar, butterfly). I did get some funny answers as well. I asked one student if he could tell me what a Monarch Butterfly caterpillar made so that it could change into a butterfly; his answer was a Cadillac! Another student informed me that she thought the Monarchs were off to Mexico to attend college!

Explore-Day 3Objective: The learner will be able to use technology to track the migration of the Monarch Butterfly over a 3-month period of time.

I introduced the website “Journey North” to the children. We looked at some pictures of Monarch Butterflies and found some pictures that we thought best represented their lifecycle and printed those out so we could hang them in our classroom. We also found a map on the website that allowed us to track the Monarch Butterfly migration route across Canada and the United States and on into Mexico. During this week in September, the Monarch Butterflies had migrated as far as the US/Canada border. We had a wonderful discussion about where Indiana was located and decided to draw our own map of North America so we could plot the migration each week as a class. We displayed our map on a bulletin board outside of our classroom, so that everyone walking by could also track their progress with us. We decided to use sticky dots in different colors to represent their southward migration. We placed the first dot on the map and labeled it, September 19th, 2007. It was placed on the line drawn to represent the US/Canada border. Another great aspect of the website was that you could help track the migration by entering your location each time you saw a Monarch Butterfly in your neighborhood. The Journey North staff would then post your location as one of the migration dots on the map, so we began to talk walks outside each day to

watch for Monarchs. As the days went on, we began to see many more, indicating that the migration was nearing our area.

Explain-Day 4Objective: The learner will demonstrate their knowledge of the Monarch lifecycle by creating a model from the materials they are given.

The children demonstrated that they understood the lifecycle of the Monarch Butterfly, so I thought I would have them assemble a butterfly lifecycle using a paper plate, assorted pasta shapes and plastic Easter grass. I put the materials along with some markers and glue on the tables in our classroom and asked the children to divide their paper plates into 4 sections, one for each of the Monarch Butterflies stages of life. I wanted them to represent the egg, the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly. The children began discovering that each of the pasta shapes could represent a stage of the butterflies’ life. The picture below is an example of what one child used to represent the Monarch Butterfly lifecycle. I shared this idea with our ESL teacher, Mrs. Rypma and let her borrow the materials to share with the older ESL students. The next day, she came back and shared with me that one of the ESL students in my classroom had gone home and proudly announced to her family that a Monarch Butterfly tongue was called a proboscis and she was able to name the 4 life stages of a Monarch Butterfly, better than the older ESL student.

Explain/Elaborate-Day 5Objective: The learner will make a storytelling bracelet to help them retell the sequence of a Monarch Butterflies’ life.

I not only wanted the children to be able to tell me the stages and lifecycle of a Monarch Butterfly, but others as well. I decided to have the children each make a storytelling bracelet. A storytelling bracelet is made of a pipe cleaner and objects (in this case beads) that will help the wearer retell a story or a sequence. I purchased some beads in different colors to represent the different stages of a Monarch Butterflies life (clear was the egg, 1 black bead and 3 green beads represented the caterpillar, yellow represented the gold dots on the chrysalis, and a butterfly shaped bead represented the Monarch itself). The children placed them on a pipe cleaner and we twisted them to make a bracelet. We practiced telling each other the life cycle.

Nature Walk: (Elaborate)I also wanted the children to share the important message that we needed to plant more milkweed plants so that the Monarch Butterflies would not disappear. We talked about what we could do to help the Monarch Butterflies. The children had discovered that Monarch Butterfly caterpillars would only eat milkweed and that adult Monarch Butterflies would only lay their eggs on a milkweed plant. During one of our walks, we took a walk through our school nature center. We discovered that there were only a few milkweed plants there. The children thought we needed to plant more. So, I began the process of writing a grant to our township foundation to request monies to purchase soil, milkweed plants, and Monarch caterpillars. The grant was turned in during the middle of January.

Week 2

Explain/Elaborate-Day 6Objective: The learner will be able to identify the destination for migrating Monarch Butterflies. The learner will also be able to visually identify whether a butterfly is male or female.

During the second week of our unit, I really wanted the children to focus on the migration aspect of the Monarch Butterfly. I showed them a short clip from a Reading Rainbow episode. The clip showed the Monarch Butterfly journey from Canada and the United States to the Trans-Volcanic Mountains of central Mexico. We then discussed the importance of the 12 special mountaintops that the Monarch Butterflies migrate to each and every year, and what a mystery it continues to be to scientists. We also began reading another Big Book; this time non-fiction titled A Butterfly is Born. I chose this book for several reasons. It has wonderful pictures showing the stages of the lifecycle, and I wanted the children to understand what an amazing journey these small insects made and keep those pictures in their mind as we learned about how far they actually travel. I also wanted the children to continue to be exposed to the rich vocabulary (the parts of a butterfly body, what the stages are called, and the process of metamorphosis) because they were part of my learner outcomes. We were also able to discover how to tell the difference between a male and female Monarch Butterfly. Through our research we found out, the male Monarch Butterfly has two small black rectangles on each of the smaller bottom wings, and the female does not.

Elaborate-Day 7Objective: The learner will be able to design his or her own symbolic Monarch Butterfly to “migrate” to Mexico.

We added another dot to our North America map and the children noted that the Monarchs were migrating very close to our state. In fact, we were beginning to read on the Journey North site, that others in Indiana had seen Monarch butterflies roosting in trees overnight in several locations. I asked the children to journal for me about their excitement and many drew pictures of Monarch Butterflies and labeled the parts. Others drew the lifecycle and many drew trees with roosting Monarchs. I also presented an idea to the children in hopes that they would better understand migration. The Journey North website was offering the opportunity to send handmade, symbolic Monarch Butterflies south to Mexico to winter in classrooms across Mexico, at the same time live Monarchs were migrating and wintering there. Symbolic Butterflies are handmade butterflies; symbolic of real butterflies that are decorated by the children and are sent by the Journey North staff at the same time the live Monarchs are migrating to Mexico. The children were excited and we got right to work decorating our Monarch Butterflies. I asked the children to make two Monarchs, one to migrate and one to display on our bulletin board. For the Monarch bodies, I photographed each child standing with their arms above their heads to make antennae and their bodies became the abdomen and thorax. They turned out beautifully and we sent them off to the Journey North offices right away. They will migrate in Mexico for the winter and we will get a flock of handmade Monarch Butterflies back in the spring when they make their return trip North. We will most likely receive butterflies from another group of children from somewhere in North America.

Evaluate-Day 8Objective: The learner will use their current knowledge of Monarch Butterflies to answer questions asked during a review game.

I wanted to check in with my students to see just how much they had learned. I decided to make a form of Jeopardy on my computer using PowerPoint that would test their knowledge of Monarch Butterflies. I made five different categories including the parts of a Monarch, what a Monarch eats, where a Monarch lives, the stages of a Monarch Butterflies life, and a category about The Very Hungry Caterpillar, since it had become a class favorite. We divided up the class and played until we ran out of answers! The children loved playing and I was very confident in the answers I was hearing and how quickly they were shouting them out.

Explain-Day 9Objective: The learner will release a balloon to visually understand migration.

I felt as though the children had learned quite a bit about Monarch Butterflies, but I still wasn’t sure they understood what “migration” meant. They were able to tell me 5 body parts, what Monarch’s ate, where they live, and the stages of life. Most of my students had not traveled outside of the state, so they did not have a concrete idea about distance and just how far a Monarch Butterfly traveled to Mexico. I wanted them to see something migrate. I gave it some thought--lots of thought, and then it hit me—balloons!! I went out the next day and purchased orange balloons, black ribbon, and a helium tank. I would have the children release balloons with a message on them to call or e-mail when they were found. We would then plot the locations where they were recovered on an Indianapolis city map, so that the children could see just where they traveled! I shared this idea with the children and they were very excited.

The next morning, I inflated 25 orange balloons, tied them with ribbon, and attached a note to the bottom. I took my morning Kindergarten class outside to release balloons. It was a cloudy morning, and there wasn’t much wind, I began reconsidering! I asked the children what they thought we should do; their vote—let them go! We let them go and several took off right into the sky, but many spent their time bouncing along the ground. We went back inside and talked about our release, I asked the children to write about their experience and what happened to their balloon. We were excited and hopeful that the few balloons that drifted away had made it somewhere!

I still had 25 more balloons and an afternoon Kindergarten class excited about letting them go. Time was short that day, and before I knew it, our book buddies had arrived. Our Book Buddies are a classroom of 2nd graders. They visit us weekly to read to my children, write with them, and participate in science activities with them. I asked their teacher Mr. McNeilley if he thought his students might want to help us release our balloons. They were excited too! I had my children explain to them what we had been doing and why we were going to release balloons. I put an extra blast of helium into each balloon, hoping that a bigger balloon would do the trick. We headed outside into what had turned into a sunny, rather windy day! Each 2nd grade book buddy held onto the ribbon with his or her Kindergarten book buddy. I counted to three and we all

released our balloons together. I started snapping pictures as fast as I could! The balloons lifted quickly up into the sky and the children started following them. My children started jumping up and down with pure joy! They were excited that their balloons had taken off. Many of the pairs of book buddies chased their balloons through the yard until they could no longer see their balloons. We stayed outside until the last balloon disappeared from sight and they went back inside to write with our book buddies about our exciting balloon launch and where we thought they would end up.

Later that afternoon, I checked my e-mail before leaving school for the day. I had an e-mail with the subject line reading, “Balloon Found”. I was THRILLED! One of our balloons had made it somewhere and was found. A gentleman had found a balloon on his lunch hour about 8 blocks north and 4 blocks east of where we were. I couldn’t wait to tell the children!

Elaborate/Evaluate-Day 11Objective: The learner will help plot balloon migration points on a map to help solidify the concept of migration.

The very first thing we did the next morning was to add a city map to our bulletin board in the hallway. We found where Spring Mill Elementary was on the map and then found the intersection of 96th and College, where the first balloon was found. I then surprised the children with the news that yet another balloon had been found, this time near 116th and Meridian. I plotted that location on the map with the afternoon class. The woman who e-mailed me that location said that she and her extended family had been having a last summer cookout and had decided to take a walk on their wooded property. They were just as excited to find the balloon, as we were to hear from them.

This is the photo that was printed in the Indianapolis Star North Side edition following the release of our migration balloons. I took this picture just seconds after the balloons were released. My afternoon Kindergarten class is pictured along with our 2nd grade book buddies.

“We found one of your balloons this evening in a tree on our property. The balloon landed at 10435 Chester Dr in Carmel Indiana. We hope your students enjoy this lesson! It was quite an event for us at an evening family cookout with all the kids and grandkids!” Doris Diamond

“I found one of you balloons on my way back from lunch.I am at the office complex at 96th and college. 900 East 96th St.Good luck with you project and have fun.”Regards,Darren

These are e-mails I received from those who recovered one of our balloons:

A few more days passed and then another person called to say they too, had found one of our balloons. This location was at 106th and Ditch Road. We found that location on a map and marked it with another thumbtack. The children were excited that these strangers had taken the time to let us know they found our balloons and each of them had wished us luck in our study of Monarch Butterflies’ migration.

Evaluate-Day 12Objective: The learner will be able to name the 5 body parts of a Monarch Butterfly, tell where they live, what they eat, how they travel, and stages of a Monarch Butterflies’ metamorphosis.

By this time, the Monarch sightings were winding down, and fewer Monarchs were roosting in the Indianapolis area at night. I wanted to assess my children to see what they had learned about Monarch Butterflies. Using the same rubric I did at the beginning of the unit, I sat down with each one of my children and asked them the same questions. What a difference in their knowledge! The chart on the next page shows the increase in their understanding of Monarch Butterflies. I then gathered the children in a large group on the floor and asked them to help me fill in the answers to their “W” questions on our KWL chart. We were able to answer most, if not all of the questions.

At the conclusion of our unit, I let the children know that even though the Monarch Butterflies were gone from our area, we would continue to check their progress throughout the coming months and check their roosting points. It was late December when I announced to the children that the majority of Monarch Butterflies had made it to Mexico, along with our handmade symbolic Monarchs.

We will continue to track the Monarch’s progress through the winter and hope to help them even more during the spring when they return to the United States to lay their eggs. We will be out in our nature center planting milkweed and releasing Monarch caterpillars, so that the children can see the lifecycle come full circle.

Assessment Data:Both at the beginning and the closure of this unit, I asked my students to answer 3 questions based upon my Learner Outcomes.

Learner Outcomes:#1 Identifies a Monarch Butterfly and names 5 body parts (abdomen, thorax, proboscis, antenna, wings) 5 4 3 2 1

#2 Tell how a Monarch Butterfly travels and to where it migrates in the fall 2 1

#3 Tell the steps of a Monarch Butterfly’s metamorphosis 4 3 2 1

Outcome #1: A point was given for each body part a student was able to identify.

Outcome #2: A point was given if a student knew that a Monarch Butterfly traveled by flying, and another point was given if the student knew that it migrated to Mexico.

Outcome #3 A point was given for each stage of metamorphosis a student was able to identify.

Student Pre-Asses. Total Post-Asses. Total Total GainMW 1/11 6/11 +5LW 8/11 11/11 +3EV 5/11 11/11 +6AT 2/11 9/11 +7RT 6/11 10/11 +4JM 0/11 6/11 +6GK 6/11 11/11 +5MJ 0/11 4/11 +4JG 0/11 3/11 +3TE 7/11 11/11 +4AE 0/11 3/11 +3AD 7/11 11/11 +4TC 0/11 6/11 +6FC 3/11 5/11 +2JB 6/11 10/11 +4PB 6/11 10/11 +4DZ 5/11 9/11 +4ES 8/11 11/11 +3JS 8/11 11/11 +3RR 7/11 10/11 +3ER 3/11 10/11 +7IR 6/11 8/11 +2EP 3/11 8/11 +5EM 4/11 8/11 +4TK 7/11 11/11 +4CC 2/11 7/11 +5MC 3/11 8/11 +5DB 6/11 11/11 +5MJ 4/11 8/11 +4NC 2/11 9/11 +7AK 5/11 10/11 +5HB 9/11 11/11 +2EB 8/11 11/11 +3

Mentorship

. I too, experienced growth during this time; I happened to see a deceased Monarch Butterfly lying in the road, and knew my students needed to see it, so I PICKED IT UP and brought it in to share with them! That never would have happened, had I not decided to share these beautiful creatures with my students!