Math Whiz and Monarch Release

On Friday we had TWO big events happen in our class!  First, Bailey earned her certificate from Xtra Math for mastering her addition facts to ten!  She has been working very hard both at home and at school to reach this milestone!  Congratulations Bailey!  She will now switch to subtraction facts on Xtra Math!

Our second big event was setting our first two Monarch butterflies free!  Mrs. Middleton, one of our favorite guest teachers, is also a butterfly expert.  She has done extensive learning about butterflies and even volunteered at Fredrick Meijer Gardens in the past with the butterflies!  She was our guest teacher on Friday while Mrs. Ferrell did assessments with students.  She said it would be fine to let our first two butterflies go even through it was quite a chilly day.  So we packed them up in a container and headed outside!

The kids made a circle around Mrs. Middleton to watch the release!

Our butterflies did not want to leave the safety of the container!

Usually, the butterflies fly away immediately after the container is open, but it was a very chilly day.  Mrs. Middleton tried several ways to coax them to fly away.  She even had one butterfly on her finger and the other one on the edge of the container.  Both dropped to the ground!

We ended up taking the butterflies over to a pine tree in a protected area of the playground and placing them in the tree.  Mrs. Middleton said they would fly off when they got used to the cooler temperatures or got hungry enough to search for nectar.

Mrs. Middleton places the butterflies in the pine tree.

Protected from the wind, our hope is that our butterflies
would fly off to find nectar and a mate!

The good news is that we still have two butterflies left to emerge!  We may return to school on Monday and see them waiting for us!  The weather looks more promising and warm for next week, so when we set the final two free, hopefully the kids will be able to watch them fly off right away!