Happy National "Learn About Butterflies" Day! Virtual Field Trip to Southern Mexico & Hyperdoc Research Details

Happy National Butterfly Day everyone!

One of our big standards in 2nd grade is life cycles. Many of our teachers teach this with the butterfly life cycle in the spring, which makes this the perfect timing for our Butterfly Research Project and a virtual field trip! Did you know that Monarch Butterflies, every 5th generation or so, migrate to southern Mexico during the winter?! Scientists don't know why they travel to their spot in Mexico and not anywhere else, but it's so fascinating to watch! I am definitely adding this to my husband and I's bucket list.

To prepare us for our virtual field trip, the teachers participating brought their classes into the library to work on researching butterflies. At this point in the year, most of our students know how to access our "go-to" databases and resources so it made for an easy start up using Hyperdocs. 

Our students loved being able to use Padlet to connect with the different classes participating in this research project. I turned on the ability to do emojis and "like" other posts this time, which made for more engagement from the students but also added to repeated "let's focus on the content" moments. 

After students researched, we participated in our virtual field trip with one of my favorite people, Brandon from the #GEOshow! He really knows his stuff. While he can be a bit long-winded at times, I think that comes from being more of an expert in his areas rather than a teacher. I love that he lets students ask questions throughout our experience and stays around afterwards to answer any other questions students may have.

After students participated in the VFT, then we went back to Padlet, expanded on what we learned and picked one piece of information that they thought their classmates would find interesting or would not know. I taught students how to use ChatterKids to create their videos and then we uploaded our videos to Flipgrid so we could share with each other and our parents.

Kids Discover is one of my favorite databases. I love that they send out free downloads for special events like this one. Check out their infopacket on Metamorphosis, highlighting the life cycle of a butterfly.

metamorphosis-infopacket-kids-discover.pdf
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