Animal Life Cycles

With spring in the air, we are studying animal life cycles.  In their notebooks, I like for them to have visuals:

Amy Lemons has a great unit on frog and butterfly life cycles.  It also comes with a good powerpoint lesson.  We also made frog life cycle pictures (kid-drawn) and the butterfly life cycle on a paper plate.  We used rice for eggs, macaroni for the chrysalis, and drew a caterpillar & butterfly.

My students also got to write observations about the butterfly life cycles.  Inexpensive caterpillars are found at Insect Lore.

We plan to have a butterfly release party on Tuesday!

Are you familiar with Animoto? After much research, my students got in groups to create presentations. It's VERY user friendly.
1.  Find photos/save.  We have Image Quest in our county's Online Research Library.
2.  Choose Animoto template.
3.  Upload pictures.  Add captions.
4.  Choose a song to go with it!
Easy as pie!  Animoto just recently added a watermark across the presentations.  Teachers can upgrade for free; I have just not done this yet.

Here are two that some of my friends did.

 In one of my research centers, I had an exploring box.  I have these little figures from Insect Lore

I also printed some life cycle pictures of my dog, my parent's dog, and my dad.  I laminated them and stuck them in the box.  Here are just a few of the pictures:

Also, here are some fun youtube videos I found.  This is a link to my 2nd Grade Science board on Pinterest:  Kim's Science.  My kids asked me to replay the song "Amphibians" OVER and OVER!! =)

And we spent a LOT of time on the life cycle of a sea turtle... more to come on that later!