Metamorphosis: Which Animal Will It Become?

Eight lettered circles fill the top of this 2nd grade page, each showing an early stage of an animal. Below stand three tall panels headed by grown-up animals, a butterfly, a frog and a ladybug, each with four dashed boxes inside for letters. The child looks at each stage and writes its letter in a box under the grown-up it will become, and the instruction warns that some boxes stay empty. The sheet shown mixes a chrysalis, a ladybug pupa, a tadpole with legs, a ladybug larva, a clump of frogspawn, a froglet, a caterpillar and a tadpole.

Metamorphosis means the young look nothing like the adult, and this page makes that the whole puzzle. A ladybug larva is long, dark and spiky and does not resemble a ladybug at all; a caterpillar does not resemble a butterfly. The child has to know the cycles well enough to trace backwards from the adult. Three animals rather than two stop children from sorting by elimination. The stages include eggs and resting pupae as well as young animals, frogspawn and a chrysalis among them, so name each stage properly as you go.

One sheet, eight stages, eight letters. Every panel has four boxes, so the boxes no longer tell children how many letters belong to each animal: on the sheet shown the frog takes four and the butterfly and ladybug two each. The ladybug is the new animal here and the one most children will need help with; a photo of a real ladybug larva on a rose leaf is convincing. This face supports NGSS 3-LS1-1 and, for how young animals come to look like their parents, 1-LS3-1.