Today we released our butterflies in the back of our school. We found an area where there were a few milkweeds that were not cut down. One flew away and three others landed on the weeds. The children also wrote letters about how sad they were to see the field beside our school cut and many of the milkweeds gone. We are hoping these will grow back. We also worked on planting some flowers and plants in the front flower bed in hopes of attracting butterflies in the future.

Friends from Scanlon came to our school and read us “The Lorax” story by Dr. Seuss. It is a light-hearted but cautionary tale with an important message. If we do not take responsibility for the environment,then our own world will soon be like the one that the Lorax left behind. So while the Once-ler did eventually see the error of his greedy ways, it was already close to too late for his world. We learned how we can protect the butterfly habitat at our school: let the milkweeds grow for butterfyy eggs and caterpillars and don’t litter on the ground and in our streams. We also need to plant flowers for the butterflies. We played a game trying to get the butterfly (us wearing butterfly wings) to Mexico without dying. If we stepped on a square with a letter “X”, we did not make the long flight to Mexico. We planted some wildflower seeds in a small cup that we took home to take care of and can plant in the ground once they grow. Our Painted Lady Caterpillars also arrived and are in 2 small cups with caterpillar food. Every few days we must clean the caterpillar poop out so they can reach the food. Once they all form their chrysalis we can move them to our large net. We are so excited to see this life cycle happen in our classroom.

Today, the weather was beautiful as we walked to our local library here in Bradford. Librarians Andrea and Michelle read us many stories and took us on a library tour. We saw board books, picture books, easy read books,chapter books and books with facts. We saw the book sorting machine in action as it sorted books into piles for the librarians to re-shelf. We heard many funny stories: “Baa Baa Smart Sheep” and “I Love Lemonade” were a few of our favourites.