Butterflies Migrate to Mexico

At the beginning of the fall season, I came upon a site offering information to parents, teachers, and students about the migration of animals, called Journey North. Among the list of animals included in the migration study-year were monarch butterflies.

As a 4-H leader, I decided to work with my younger students on the topic of studying these migratory animals, and this would make a great project for the youngsters. I felt that studying migratory animals would teach my group a vast amount of information, not only on the specific animals of butterflies, but sharing map skills, team-work, navigation, math (using estimation), science - biology, and more.

We decided to study butterflies for an entire month, making sure we were able to really absorb the information, starting off with a map showing where the monarch butterflies lived, then where they were going to migrate to. We read a book entittled: Isabel's House of Butterflies, by Tony Johnston, and we continued to track the migration of the butterflies.

The book brings up the tree that the monarchs are attracted to in Mexico, called the Oyamel tree. Naturally, we became butterflies, looking for our winter home, as well as our food source. To really involve the kids in the preservation of the oyamel trees and the discussion following the reading of Isabella's house of Trees, we made our very own oyamel tree.

First, we took tubes from paper towels and stapled the top. Second, we patted Model Magic into a flat surface to fold over our tubes to create texture for our tree. Because we used white Model Magic and not brown, the stuents then rolled their tubes into a browish colored sand to create the bark of the tree. (You could use brown Model Magic, butt he kids really enjoyed using the sand for texture.)

After the bark of the tree was complete, we passed around pictures of the forests in Mexico that have the oyamel trees and let the kids start making their own branches. The trees are considered to be in the fir family, and look much like fir trees, so we used different sized pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks, painted green, to create the look of the branches.

Lastly, we used stamped paper butterflies, colored them orange and black, folded them in half and used glue dots to secure them to the surface of our branches.

The kids could choose how many butterflies they wanted to put on their tree. We had shown several pictures of the butterflies on the oyamel trees, from the Journey North website, and we learned that the butterflies swarm the trees. Because these trees are limiited in source and are used often in Mexico for generating revenue for the poor, there aren't enough oyamel trees to supply food to the monarchs traveling from the eastern coasts of North America. We made our own little forest of the oyamel trees with our monarch butterflies on them.

This lesson introduced conservation, environmentalism, preservation, mapping skills, estimation of how many monarchs travel to Mexico, and geography - learning about a different area of the world. Oh, and biology - we saw the different life stages of a monarch butterfly - living in Florida, we have them in abundance - and then worked on a labeling sheet to pinpoint where different areas of the butterflies were.

This lesson was a great deal of fun for all of the adults and children involved. We all learned at least one new tidbit of information about the monarch butterflies and how to assist them in their migration every year.