Spring is the perfect time to add some butterfly fun to your home! Hatching our own butterflies is a spring tradition for us. While we wait for our caterpillars to arrive, we dig into some great books and projects to learn more about butterflies. Here are our favorite spring time butterfly books and hands-on activities.
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Raising Our Own Butterflies
Hatching your own butterflies is a great way to witness the life cycle up close. It’s a favorite spring tradition! We’ve always had great hatching results with the Painted Lady Butterfly kits from Insect Lore. You can get a kit with everything you need including the cup of caterpillars! If you’re planning ahead or giving a gift, they have kits that come with a certificate good for the caterpillars when it’s time to dive into this experience.
From start to finish, raising butterflies takes about 3 weeks. Look ahead to your weather and plan on releasing them when day time temperatures are between 55 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Later in the summer, we reuse our butterfly habitat to raise a tomato horn worm! These are common pests in the garden if you grow tomatoes, peppers, or eggplants. As much as gardeners despise them, the moths are gorgeous and it’s fun for the kids to see this process too. Read more about this fun tomato horn worm project!
Butterfly Journal and Lapbook
We use this cute butterfly observation journal every year when we hatch our own painted lady butterflies. Everyday the girls note the stage of the butterflies and draw a picture of what they see. It’s been fun to go back and look at the journals from previous years to see how their observations and drawings have changed as they get older. I normally try not to use printables that have a lot of color because they will eat through printer ink really fast, but these are just too darn cute to pass up!
We also really love this butterfly lapbook. This was the first lapbook that we’d ever done, and I have to admit that I was a bit intimidated. Lapbooks can certainly look scary at first, but they’re super easy and fun once you dive in. My girls still have these lapbooks handy and look through them every spring when we hatch painted lady butterflies.
Butterfly Lessons
Butterfly Anatomy – This isn’t a website meant for kids but this is a great resource for older kids that explains the anatomy in more detail than you normally find for children. If you’ve “been there, done that” with all things butterflies, check out this website to take your kids’ butterfly knowledge to the next level!
The Butterfly Conservatory – This is the Educator Resources page for the Butterfly Conservatory from The American Museum of Natural History. You’ll find great articles, photos, and videos to share with your kids.
Monarch Joint Venture is a conservation group dedicated to protecting the monarch butterfly. This website is packed with articles, photos, and videos. Most of the material is not meant for kids, but older kids will be able to understand it. They do have a section for resources for kids that you can find here.
Life Cycle Video – My kids love watching this video which details the life cycle in a story format from the perspective of a butterfly.
Related Post: 18 Beautiful Butterfly Books
Free Butterfly Printables
Butterfly Life Cycle Wheel – This is a fun life cycle wheel for kids to color and assemble.
Life Cycle Coloring Booklet – Here’s a small booklet for kids to color that illustrates the butterfly life cycle. We added this to our lapbooks.
Cut and Paste Anatomy – Here’s a free printable for younger kids learning butterfly anatomy.
Check out 50 Butterfly Coloring Pages and this Color by Number butterfly page.
Top L – Zebra Longwing, Top R – Monarch, Bottom L – Blue Morpho, Bottom R – Julia Longwing
Bring it to Life
We love heading to a local butterfly habitat every spring! The kids can really get up close and observe many butterflies. These butterflies stay still long enough for even little kids to get a really great look. The pictures above were all taken a recent trip. Definitely take the time to visit a butterfly habitat if you have one in your area!
Getting a close up look at butterflies outside is easier if you can find some quiet time with your kids. We often join our homeschool friends for nature hikes, but having more than just a few kids exploring an area is a great way to make the wildlife scatter quickly. Now, we arrive at the hike location about 30 minutes before everyone else so that we can observe nature’s creatures quietly. We see far more butterflies (and other wildlife) than when we’re with friends. Many of the creatures even stick around long enough for us to look them up in our identification guides. This simple change has been wonderful!
Butterflies are a favorite insect for kids to learn about in the spring. There are so many ways to explore them…through books, activity pages, videos, lapbooks and, of course, in person by hatching butterflies and seeking them out in nature.
What are your favorite butterflies to find in the spring?
Looking for more nature fun with kids?
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So many fun things to do here! My daughter and granddaughters raised butterflies. They really enjoyed it. Pinning to save!
Raising butterflies is always a fun spring activity! Such a delight for kids