Features

Photos courtesy of Karyn Roseburg
Josiah Scribner, a first grader at Westgate Elementary, holds a butterfly on a flower in the Tropical Butterfly House at the Pacific Science Center.

For three weeks, students in Room 3 at Westgate Elementary shared their classroom with 50 free, fluttering butterflies.

From February to March, first and second graders in Mrs. Roseburg’s class had been studying first-hand the life cycle of the butterfly for their Life Cycle unit. 

Instead of keeping the butterflies in a net once they emerged from their chrysalises, the students released them into the classroom.

“Having the butterflies fly in the classroom just made it that much more fascinating to them,” said their teacher Karyn Roseburg.  “I mean, they know the life cycle.  We didn’t just watch a movie or read a book; they got to see it from start to finish.”

As a treat, the class went on a field trip to the Pacific Science Center on May 14 to see the butterflies in the center’s Tropical Butterfly House.

Built in 1998, the Butterfly House is a warm, sunny and humid exhibit where tropical butterflies from South and Central America, Africa and Asia fly, sun themselves and feed amid tropical flowers and plants, according to the PSC Web site.  New butterflies can be seen emerging at the exhibit’s chrysalis-viewing window.

“We watched the butterflies fly around, just to see what they would do,” said second grader Allison Stanley.  “Sometimes they landed on [us].  It was a good thing that one landed on my mom. It stayed on her for a little while and, after a couple minutes, it flew away.”

Second grader Hannah Monahan (back) and first grader Emri Klein (front), both from Westgate Elementary, investigate butterflies in the Tropical Butterfly House at the Pacific Science Center.

At the PSC, Horticulturist Jeff Leonard – aka “the butterfly man” – gave the students a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the Butterfly House.

In groups of 12 or so, while the rest of the class was exploring the Butterfly House, the butterfly man invited the students into the back room where PSC staff care for the butterflies and moths they release regularly into the Butterfly House. 

There, in the Emerging Room, he showed them how the staff receives hundreds of chrysalises and cocoons in boxes, sorts them inside a butterfly incubator, and then pins them up on a board to hang in the chrysalis-viewing window until the butterflies and moths emerge.

The class was fascinated when the butterfly man told them how about once a week a wasp will emerge from a chrysalis instead of a butterfly.  He said a wasp will occasionally lay their eggs inside a caterpillar, and when the eggs hatch while inside the chrysalis, they eat the caterpillar and then emerge in its place.

First grader Ian McDermott had fun visiting the Butterfly House at the PSC.  He said he liked finding the butterflies and then identifying them on a butterfly chart.

“I like the butterflies,” he said.  “I like how they fly.  They flap their wings really fast.”

First grader Rayne Schezing had never been to the Butterfly House before the class field trip on Friday.  She said it was awesome how the exhibit was made to look like a tropical rainforest inside.

“When we were with the butterfly man in the Emerging Room, I saw a few of them hatch out of their chrysalis,” she said.  “My favorite one was this black and green butterfly.”

At the start of February, the class received 80 mail-in Painted-Lady Butterfly caterpillars from the Edmonds School District for their Life Cycle unit.

The students watched as their butterflies changed from caterpillars to a chrysalis to a butterfly, and recorded their observations in their science journals. 

As their butterflies changed, they learned about the parts of a caterpillar, their butterflies’ habitat and food sources, the developmental stages of a butterfly and how to care for them.

At the end of February, when the butterflies were starting to emerge from their chrysalises, the butterfly man – who is friends with the parent of a student in the class – visited Westgate and gave a presentation to the class about what butterflies and plants need and how they work together.  He invited them to schedule their field trip to the PSC.

The butterfly man also helped the students release the butterflies into the classroom.  They shut all the windows, put up signs notifying the school, and were careful when going in and out of the classroom that they didn’t let any butterflies escape.

Until the butterflies died, the first and second graders watched them as they fluttered around the classroom, feeding on sugar water, flowers and fruit.

“We had too many [butterflies] to stay in their little net, and it was fun for the kids to have the opportunity,” Roseburg said of letting the butterflies loose in the classroom.  “They would be working along, and a butterfly would land on their paper.”

Roseburg wanted to expand her students’ thinking about the life cycle, so she bought several Leopard Frog tadpoles for the classroom.  As the butterflies were changing with their life cycles, so too were the frogs.

“One of my students wasn’t really interested in butterflies, but he was really interested in frogs,” she said, “and so we were able to get the whole class to learn about the life cycle in different ways.”