Butterfly Life Cycle Collage

Inspired by these lovely insect collages, we went on a little nature walk and gathered materials, then made these Butterfly Life Cycle collages with what we found. As you can see they weren't ideal for laying flat and putting in binders, but they were still fun to make. :)

For more on the life cycles of insects, and photographs of the different stages, see this post. (And for another craft, see here.)

Junie really loved this project. She made several different pictures. Here are two of them.

Abe's "Orange Morpho."

Malachi's cute little egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly.

Japanese Cherry Blossom Art

Inspired by these collages and these lovely paintings, we decided to do a combination of the two and make some multimedia pictures of Japanese cherry blossoms (or sakura.) We liked learning about the significance of sakura to the Japanese, and its symbolic associations with the samurai and the fragility of human life. This video tells more about cherry blossoms, and we also liked this book about the cherry trees Japan gave to the United States.

Utah actually has a similar story: Boy Scouts in Japan donated some cherry trees to the International Peace Gardens in Salt Lake, but they had to be burned because of quarantine issues. You can read that story here.

We made these paintings by first washing a thin coat of blue paint onto watercolor paper (cut into long rectangles to look sort of like a Japanese scroll). Some of the children put a paper cup over their paper and painted around it to leave a white "moon" in the background.

Then we put lines of very watered-down brown tempura paint onto our papers and blew along the paint with a straw. This was supposed to move the paint organically down the paper and make it fork into natural-looking branches. It worked pretty well, though it was hard not to blow down and make a big blob on the paper. We got better at it as we went along. We also kept getting light-headed, so if you try this remember to take breaks every now and then.

Last, we put little squares of pink tissue paper around the eraser side of pencils, dipped them in glue, and pressed them onto the paper. I remember how much I liked doing this in kindergarten, and I STILL like it. It's just fun.

Some of the children wanted to write things on their pictures, so they looked up kanji characters and tried to copy them.

Junie's cherry tree. She did this all by herself. I like it.

Simple Machine Collages

The children made collages using whatever they could find around the house to depict the six simple machines. I liked them. The above is Sebby's.

Abe's collage

Daisy's

Malachi's

And even Junie made one. :)

Beehive Collages

We learned about the history of beekeeping, and that included information on different types of beehives used over the years. I had the children make a collage depicting any type of beehive they chose. Abraham made a Langstroth Hive (shown above). This is the modern kind of beehive which is basically all people use these days. Langstroth was one of the first people to take advantage of "bee space" (the amount of space bees need between sections of comb to feel comfortable) and make it really easy for beekeepers to remove honeycomb without destroying the whole hive. You can see that Abe has shown the vertical frames coming down within the supers, and the queen excluder keeping the queen down in the brood cells rather than up in the honey supers.

Malachi made a rocket-ship-shaped beehive. There is fire below each leg, to keep hungry ants and other crawling insects out of the hive! He wrote "I wonder what it's like to be a bee."

Seb made the "classic" beehive shape, which is on the Utah State Flag. This kind of hive is called a "skep" and it's usually made out of woven or bundled rings of straw. The bees build their own honeycomb inside the hive, so if you harvest the honey, you pretty much have to destroy the hive in the process.