Kindergarten students at Trevvett Elementary have been learning about life cycles (SOLK.7c), so today, Ms. Gouldman’s class used ABCYa! Animate to create animations of the butterfly life cycle. First, we reviewed the stages a butterfly goes through–from egg, to larva, to chrysalis (metamorphosis), and to adult. Next, we went to ABCYa! Animate, and I showed them how to use the paint tools to draw some butterfly eggs in frame one. We looked at some pictures of butterfly eggs on the Internet so they could see the size and color of them. I pointed out that many butterfly eggs were laid on plants. Why do you think that is? Then, we went to frame two and drew the caterpillar. We looked at caterpillar images online to see the incredible variety in their colors and designs. We continued with the other stages, looking at photos of each stage, and then drawing our own creative ideas. When we were finished, we slowed down the animation using the frame rate button (bottom right), turned on looping so it repeated, and pressed play. The students were excited to see their butterfly move through each stage. Since it loops, it also shows how an adult lays more eggs and the life cycle repeats itself. Finally, we exported our animations as GIFs, and I uploaded them to a Lino page. Lino is similar to Padlet for sharing files, but since I’ve reached my limit on Padlet for the free account, I had to find something different. You can see all their animations here.

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 for both. 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 published 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.