Butterfly Learning Activities and Crafts

Butterflies are starting to show up where I live, and my daughter and I are excited to volunteer this summer at the butterfly house at our local botanical garden. She already knows a lot about butterflies, but for the rest of us, here are some butterfly learning activities and some fun crafts to make while you learn.

The life cycle of butterflies is endlessly fascinating, and you can grab a simple printable coloring page or a printable life cycle wheel kids can color and assemble from Super Teacher Worksheets (those two resources are free; they have lots of others you can get if you’re a member).

Or check out the life cycle cards (made to be used with play dough but you can also just use them as cards) from No Stress Homeschooling. This printable pack is free when you enter your email and also includes math and language arts activities.

The foldable life cycle printable from Mrs Merry Designs on Etsy is also really cute and a low-prep learning activity for kids.

Whether you have a place to go see butterflies or raise your own, you might need some help identifying the butterflies you see. Rock Your Homeschool has a great set of butterfly identification printables and journal pages to help kids identify and learn about common types of butterflies.

Look We’re Learning has butterfly identification flash cards you can use to play matching and memory games, or to help identify real butterflies you see.

Reading books about butterflies is also a great way to learn about them and how humans can help our butterfly populations. Milkweed for Monarchs by Christine Van Zandt (illustrated by Alejandra Barajas) is a rhyming story about the life cycle of a monarch butterfly with additional educational information. It notes that monarchs can only eat milkweed and encourages readers to plant some to help the butterflies that pass through their area. There are also fun facts in the back to help kids learn more. (40 pages, hardcover, published 2024 by Beaming Books, suggested retail price $18.99)

There are so many fun butterfly crafts out there but here are a few fun ones to check out:

Printable butterfly suncatcher | Artsy Fartsy Mama
Symmetrical butterfly painting | The Craft Train
Butterfly spoon puppet | Ocean Child Crafts
Flapping butterfly craft | One Little Project

Butterfly Life Cycle Sensory Jars

Work on Symmetry with this Easy Butterfly Craft

Printable Butterfly Identification Cards

Looking for the best tools to help teach your child to read? Explore our specially curated Amazon Idea List featuring top-rated reading products designed to make learning to read fun and effective. From engaging phonics programs to interactive toys and books, we have everything you need to support your child’s reading journey. Visit our list now and discover the best resources to teach your child to read!

You can also see some of our other articles on reading activities and ideas here.

125 more activities to get your child to read.

Next Plan Idea:

Fun Activities to Learn about Butterflies

It might seem weird to feature a book about protest movements around the Fourth of July, but as Rise Up! Powerful Protests in American History reminds us, protest is patriotic and part of the very fabric of American life from the beginning.

This picture book, written by history teacher Rachel C. Katz and illustrated by Sophie Bass, tells a rhyming story of how Americans have stood up throughout the nation’s history to protest and spread the word about injustice and unsafe conditions. From the Boston Tea Party to modern movements like the Standing Rock pipeline protests and the Obergefell case, it touches on women’s rights, environmental activism, civil rights, Pride, access for disabled people and more.

The illustrations, often based on historic protest signs and artwork, help tell the stories, while a timeline, map, and overview of each event for further discussion. Readers will learn about Silent Spring and The Jungle, the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, the Seneca Falls convention, Robert Smalls, the Delano Grape Strike and the movement to un-dam the Klamath River, to name a few.

Each event includes a few bullet points to provide context about what happened, why and what the result was. The book reminds readers that protests are not always effective, or don’t always get the people involved what they want right away (since it took women 72 years to get the right to vote after Seneca Falls, for example).

This book is a great way to introduce kids to the long and proud history of protest movements in the United States and could prompt discussions about current events and things happening that they might want to see changed. It could also be used to start kids researching different protests discussed in the book for further learning. You can talk about how art can educate people and encourage kids to make their own art pieces to educate others about something important to them.

Rise Up! is a great starting point for learning about the history of protest and the effects it has had on American history. The publisher’s website has more resources for teaching with this book at the link below.

About the book: 48 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Barefoot Books. Suggested retail price $17.99.

Next Plan Idea:

Have you read?

Leave a Reply