Animal Life Cycles

Well we've just finished our unit on animal life cycles in science, and we're just starting plant life cycles. Personally, I prefer teaching about the animal life cycles, but that's just me. ;-) I suppose plants are interesting to the kiddos since there is a lot you can do with experiments and such.

Anyway, we learned all about human, frog, butterfly, chicken, and honeybee life cycles. The students love this unit, especially as most of them are genuinely interested in animals. I was saved sad (for the kids only) this year, because we did NOT do the baby chicks. It was just too much with this big group, and with the way everything fell schedule wise, we just weren't able to do it. Oh darn. For those of you who don't know me, I have an abnormal hatred of birds. Weird I know, but when you have had tons of birds poop on you (I know, I know, it means good luck in England - well guess what, I don't live in England) or fall and die in your driveway, they kind of freak you out, ha!

In addition to reading tons of books, watching a United Streaming video, making/writing some of our own life cycle books, and some various other projects, we did a couple of neat things that turned out very well. The students did a great job on these butterfly life cycle pictures, and this was an idea I had found in Mailbox magazine a few years back. I slightly tweaked it so the students were doing their own writing, but otherwise the idea was in Mailbox.

These fabulous chicken life cycle projects were tweaked and modified from an idea that Rachel at I Heart Crafty Things had posted, and I actually found it on wonderful Pinterest. It seems that quite a few people have found this great project! :-) Here is a direct link to her original post: Original Chicken Life Cycle Project and you can see below how ours turned out in comparison (definitely not as fancy, but still cute!).

Happy Monday to all of you! Someone mentioned to me today that there are only 4 more Mondays left, and that is just crazy to me! The year is absolutely flying by, and we're really entering our "busy season", so I will try not to disappear too much. :-) 

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