Kindergarten students at Holladay Elementary have been learning about the butterfly life cycle (SOLK.7c), so today Ms.Hartwell’s and Ms.Ambrose’s classes created animations showing the life cycle from egg to adult. First, we reviewed the four stages: egg, larva, chrysalis (pupa), and adult butterfly. We used two different websites to create our animations: in Ms. Hartwell’s class we used SketchToy, and in Ms. Ambrose’s class we used ABCYa!Animate, but the process was basically the same. We started by drawing the egg. I showed them examples of real butterfly eggs using a Google image search. We noticed that most eggs were white or yellow and were laid on plants. Next we used the drawing tools to draw the larva. Again, I used a Google image search to show examples. We repeated those steps for the chrysalis and the adult butterfly. Finally, we shared our animations. SketchToy generates a link which replays the drawing. ABCYa!Animate makes a GIF file that we uploaded to Padlet. You can see Ms.Hartwell’s class projects here and Ms.Ambrose’s class projects here.
