Fun Activities to Learn about Butterflies

Spring is a great time of year to talk about butterflies, whether you live where butterflies are migrating this time of year or not. Here are some fun resources, games and butterfly themed activities to help your kids learn about and explore the world of butterflies.

Learning Activities with Butterflies

Learn the basics of the life cycle of a butterfly with this collection of videos compiled by Simply Kinder. One or two of these would be a great way to kick off your studies.

Little Pine Learners has a gorgeous set of butterfly identification printables on their Teachers Pay Teachers page, plus a full blog post that shows you a bunch of different ways to use them. I love the idea of hiding the different butterflies outside for kids to find, then coming indoors to identify them.

These butterfly identification flash cards from Look We’re Learning are a fun way to learn about different kinds of butterflies, match them up and even play find the match in rice or another sensory material.

These free butterfly printables from Living Montessori Now are great to use when practicing letters and numbers. She has her own printables with a butterfly and the letter b and numbers 0-5, but the post links up more great butterfly letter resources too.

How Wee Learn has a great set of printable butterfly activity pages, including coloring sheets, anatomy, life cycle, color by number and complete the drawing pages.

ABCs of Literacy has a free printable playdough mat showing the parts of a butterfly, which is a good way to introduce little kids to those terms and let them play with making their own butterfly shapes with playdough.

This caterpillar to butterfly balloon experiment from The Educator’s Spin on It is a riff on the classic vinegar and baking soda reaction with a butterfly twist. A fun and easy way to make your butterfly “take flight” with items you probably already have in the house.

Homeschool Preschool has collected more easy butterfly STEM ideas for little learners.

Butterfly Art Activities and Games

Butterflies give us a fun way to talk about symmetry and to make a symmetrical, butterfly themed art project like this one from Simply Full of Delight.

Or make coffee filter butterflies, which is a classic, easy but always fun craft. Get the instructions from Organized Island.

Collect bits of leaves, grass, spring flowers and other things you find in nature on a nice day and make a sticky butterfly art piece like Happy Toddler Playtime did.

Nature Inspired Learning has a fun printable butterfly bingo card set, with 12 different cards full of colorful butterflies to match up.

Need more ideas for a day or a week of butterfly fun? Check out the ideas Glitter on a Dime used to make a week-long butterfly camp for their kiddos one summer.

Printable Butterfly Identification Cards

Butterfly Life Cycle Sensory Jars

Butterfly Suncatchers

Butterfly Life Cycle Craft

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Butterfly Learning Activities and Crafts

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

Learning Activities with Butterflies

Butterfly Art Activities and Games

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