Imagining the Butterfly Life Cycle with Whole Body Play

My preschooler simply loves butterflies right now! As we prepared a report about butterflies for our recent project fair, we took the chance to act out the parts of the butterfly life cycle. This whole body gross motor play is just how she learns! I know she'll not forget the details we discussed: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly with antennae and proboscis. These are now ingrained in her memory. Plus, it was tons of fun to act out!

What You Need for the Gross Motor Butterfly Life Cycle

Here is what we used to act out the butterfly life cycle.

• laundry basket (egg)
• green towel (a leaf to eat)
• blanket (chrysalis)
• headband and two pipe cleaners (antennae)
• fairy wings (or otherwise)
• party blower (proboscis)
• construction paper flower

The party blower is super important as this is the most fun part of being a butterfly...you get to flit around and eat nectar! So, this is why I put "construction paper flower" on the list to be pretend flowers for the butterflies to eat.

Acting Out the Butterfly Life Cycle

It all starts with an egg. My daughter crawled under the laundry basket to pretend to be inside an egg. We put it on a green towel so we could pretend the egg was on a leaf. Even my toddler could not hesitate to get in the fun. She did not want to come out of her egg. She wanted to stay all cozy underneath the there. 

Next, the caterpillar needs to hatch from the egg and "eat" the green leaf underneath. Once our butterfly was hatched, both of my girls were eager to turn around and "eat" her egg. We learned that the caterpillars eat their eggs before they even start looking for leaves. One the basket was out of the way, my preschooler "ate" the leaf too, aka the towel.

Then it was time for our caterpillar to go into her chrysalis. She loved that I picked her all the way up to completely wrap her in the blanket. 

She tried to put her wings, antennae (headband) and proboscis (party blower) on while under there. It's not so easy. Then she emerged as a butterfly!

Then it was time to flit over to the flower. Strawberry loved this fact that we learned: butterflies taste a flower with their feet to see if they will like it!

And then, of course, it was time to use the party blower to drink the nectar. I love how this shot was somewhat in motion.

We acted out the butterfly life cycle at least three full times. the shots are somewhat blurry because, well, I can't get my five year old to go slowly and sit still! This was perfect for learning about the butterfly life cycle. She'll never forget it!

Watch the YT Short to see it all!