Butterfly Life Cycle

A tall plant grows up the middle of this 1st grade page, and four big circles around it act like magnifying glasses, each joined by a line to a small spot on the plant. One shows a ridged egg on a leaf, one a caterpillar on a leaf, one a chrysalis hanging under a leaf and one an orange butterfly on the flower. The egg is already marked 1. The child writes 2, 3 and 4 in the dashed boxes under the other three as the butterfly grows. Below a dotted line the butterfly appears again with a looping arrow and one last box, and there the child writes the number of the picture that comes after the butterfly.

That last box is what turns a sequence into a cycle. The answer is 1, because the butterfly lays the egg, and a child who writes 5 has shown that they still think of the life cycle as a line with an end. The four stages sit where they really happen on a plant, the egg on a leaf and the chrysalis hanging underneath one, so the page also shows that every stage lives on the same plant. The word chrysalis is used rather than cocoon, which belongs to a moth.

One sheet, four stages, four numbers. This is the base page of the animal life cycles family; its faces add the frog, the labeling words, metamorphosis across three animals, a comparison and a what-comes-next page. The full cycle belongs to grade 3 in NGSS, as 3-LS1-1, and this page brings it down to a first grade numbering task. Raising caterpillars in the classroom in spring is the best companion if you can manage it.