In this season of change, before this week when the deep cold set in, we’ve been seeing monarch butterflies everywhere.  In the yard, when we go walking…

In trying to teach with the seasons of life as well as the seasons of the year, it seemed right to step away from some other things that we were working on to do a little nature study of the beautiful monarch.

Some books from the library that we’ve been enjoying:

An Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly

by: Laurence Pringle

with paintings by: Bob Marstall

This one is really lovely, with beautiful paintings.

Monarch Butterflies: Mysterious Travelers

text and photographs by: Bianca Lavies

And this one has amazing photographs of things like forests, completely covered in monarchs.

We also created some mixed-media monarch butterfly art of our own:

The project started with wet-on-wet watercolor paintings, complete with my uber fancy paper bag painting boards.  We each did a wash of golden yellow, covering our entire paper.  From there we used two shades of red, layered over top to start to pull out the suggestion of a butterfly form.  We experimented a bit with using a dry brush to pull color from certain areas and adding several layers of color in other areas for depth and a variety of hues.

We recently lost our favorite source of painting paper.  This was our first time working with this new brand and it was quite frustrating.  Galen was very upset when he painted right through his paper!  Even the older boys came close to making the same mistake.

Later in the week, once the paintings were dry, we used black calligraphy pens to fill in the details.  It took me a very long time the night before to finish mine.  The boys eventually gave up on the pens.  They were the marker sort and not nearly inky enough.  Inferior art supplies are such a bore!  They switched to black crayons and colored pencils, which got the job done, but didn’t give the same sharp clear lines and left a smeared haze on sections of their paintings.

Galen was not to be deterred and lacking a painting, made a drawing to add to our display.  After the black, we used a very fine brush, dipped in undiluted white watercolor paint, to add in the dots and other light details.  I actually think that White Out would have worked well too.

The week of this lesson, we were called upon to rescue not one, but two monarch butterflies, on different days and under different circumstances.  One was stuck in the mud in a roadside ditch, the other desperately trying to escape a bucket full of water.  Incredible to have them so close at hand, instead flitting away in fields, or a mere picture in a book.  Their many adoring observers brought a veritable feast of flowers, and thus were even able to watch them feed up close.  It’s highly convenient when Mother Nature decides to supplement my lesson plan.