Each adult butterfly lives only about four to five weeks. But one of the many wonders of the Monarchs is the annual creation of a unique “Methuselah generation.” As autumn approaches in their sites of migratory origin, a very special generation of butterflies is born. Unlike their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents — all of whom had ephemeral lives measured only in weeks — these migratory butterflies survive seven or eight months. In human terms, given our average life span of 75 years, this would be like having children who lived to be 525 years old!

This generation performs the incredible feat of flying from Canada and the United States to the center of Mexico — after which they begin the northward journey again. Once they reach the United States, a kind of relay race begins: their short-lived offspring, with only four or five weeks to live, continue making the trek northward over several generations.

The Monarch of Migration

Of all migrations by small creatures, few are as astonishing as the one performed by the Monarch butterfly. The embodiment of fragility, these insects travel between 1,200 and 2,800 miles or more between their starting and ending points — a feat without parallel. What is even more remarkable is that the ones that return to the places where Monarchs hibernate have never been there before. These are the great-great-great-grandchildren of those that performed the intrepid journey from southeast Canada and the United States to central Mexico.

Like several species of birds, bats and whales, the Monarch butterfly of Canada and the United States migrates to places where the climate is less extreme. Winters are too cold in the places where the butterflies reproduce; Monarchs would not be able to withstand either heavy snowfall or the lack of plants on which larval caterpillars feed. As such, the Monarch heads south each fall, where it will stand a greater chance of survival-as well as the chance to “return” to reproductive sites in North America and give rise to future generations of reproductive adults that will complete the annual cycle.

The Monarch butterflies that migrate southward in the autumn are guided by the sun’s orbit as they travel through North America. Even on cloudy days they stay on track thanks to an internal biological compass that functions according to the movement of the sun.

The migration moves at a pace of about almost 50 miles a day, though there are some butterflies that have flown up to 80 miles in a day. Throughout the migration, they continue to store and replenish energy each day by extracting nectar from flowers they encounter along the way. But the butterflies also suffer from illnesses and infections that can be fatal, and must face other dangers including bad weather, predation by birds during hibernation, and big losses in the population due to winter storms.

At the end of October and the beginning of November, after traveling two months, the butterflies settle into hibernation colonies in the mountains of central Mexico, where the States of Mexico and Michoacan meet. There they will spend the winter hibernating.

From mid-November until mid-February, the Monarchs’ hibernation colonies remain relatively stable. During the second half of February, when temperatures rise and humidity decreases in the forests, the butterflies come down from the slopes to mate. And the butterflies that survive the hibernation in Mexico return in the spring to the southern United States.

The Monarch Butterfly website allows you to track the butterflies migration. If you have butterflies in your classroom this site is a good thing to let your students look at once a week to see how far the butterflies have gone. To take the lesson futher you could have the students track the butterflies on a map and calculate how far the butterflies have gone and how long it took them to get to Mexico.

Activities:

Internet Field Trip: Holidays ’Round the World Wide Web
These Web sites provide information on the origins, symbols, music, and food of different holidays, including Chanukah, Christmas, Diwali, and Kwanzaa. Students can also exchange their traditions with classrooms from faraway places.

Winter Holidays
by Jacqueline Clarke
Instructor Magazine | November ,2002
Bring families together with these easy projects that they can do together. Construct a dinner plate bar graph marking favorite holiday foods and decorate your classroom with a star-studded holiday global wish list.

Time to Celebrate!
Instructor Magazine | Second-grade teacher Jackie Howes and her students always host a multicultural celebration in December. Here are some of her favorite activities.

Fun Holiday Crafts
Create these easy-to-make holiday decorations and crafts, including a Hanukkah mobile, Kwanzaa cards, a tissue paper wreath, and many delightful recipes.

December Celebrations
Build a classroom library for the December holidays beginning with this list of titles. Compare the December holidays of Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa with these exercises in Social Studies, Language Arts, and Art.

Lessons:

Let’s Celebrate!
by Gayle Berthiaume
Students organize ideas in a chart to compare and contrast five cultural holidays. After reading books on each holiday, students make projects, including their own Christmas lights and a Ramadan penny jar.

Going green at school isn’t just about student involvement. Teachers can learn how to make eco-conscious choices in the teacher’s lounge and when designing lesson plans, too.

1. Unplug your mini-fridge: Consider sharing a mini-fridge with the teachers down the hall instead of having your own private refrigerator that soaks up extra electricity.
2. Keep your grades online: Online gradebooks save paper and invite parents to take a more active role in evaluating student performance.
3. Drink Fair Trade Coffee: Introduce Fair Trade Coffee to the teachers’ lounge for an eco-conscious, humanitarian pick-me-up.
4. Bring a mug or glass to school: Instead of pouring coffee or water into a styrofoam cup, bring your own mug or glass to school, which can be washed and reused over and over again.
5. Use recycled paper: All teachers go through a ton of notebooks and papers each year, so using recycled paper and then recycling all your files after the year is over will positively impact the environment.
6. Use PowerPoint: Start creating PowerPoint presentations to deliver notes, photos and study guides without wasting paper.
7. E-mail other teachers and administration: If your school hasn’t already, try to start an e-mail only campaign that eliminates needing hard copies of substitute requests, field trip proposals and meeting RSVPs.
8. Send Rescue Paper thank you notes: Send thank you notes for teacher gifts or notify a parent of a high-achieving child with these Rescuse Paper stationery.
9. Insulate doors: At the end of the day, slide draft guards under your door to insulate the room and keep energy consumption down.

Things You’ll Need:

• Paper towels
• Milk weed leaves
• Jar with screen lid

Step 1:

Locate a garden or field containing milk weed plants and search the underside of the leaves for monarch eggs. They will be small football shaped bumps not much bigger than a pin head. Break off the entire leaf, being careful not to disturb the egg. Monarch butterflies generally only lay one egg on each plant to ensure that their offspring have ample food.

Step 2:

Place the leaf on a damp paper towel and keep moist until the egg hatches; generally in three to five days. The top of the egg will turn a dark color just before the larvae emerges.

Step 3:

Move the leaves containing the larvae to a clear container such as a small aquarium with a screen lid. Place several fresh milk weed stems with leaves inside the container as a food source. A clear container is best for viewing and the lid needs to have holes small enough to keep the larvae in while still allowing air to circulate.

Step 4:

Replace the milk weed as needed for the next several days but raise the lid carefully as there may be larvae on it. At the same time, be sure to dump the waste accumulating in the bottom of your container. Like any other creature, monarch larvae need a clean habitat to survive.

Step 5:

Watch for the larvae to crawl to the top of the container, or top of a branch if you provided one, and hang in a “J” formation. This is the beginning of their pupa stage and in a matter of minutes they will attach themselves to the branch and shed their skin. Then they form their chrysalis over the next few hours.

Step 6:

Observe the chrysalis for the next week or so and take note of any changes in color. When the adult is ready to emerge, it will turn dark. The chrysalis is clear and what you are actually seeing are the dark black and orange colors of the monarch butterfly.

Step 7:

Allow newly emerged butterflies several hours to dry their wings before handling. If they emerged in the morning, release them outside at the end of the day. You can wait until the following morning without feeding them but no longer than one day. If possible, release them outdoors near flowers.

There are so many different lessons and projects that can be done in the classroom (or at home) for the Thanksgiving holiday. There is a list of some ideas (for grades K-3):

Art Projects:

Turkey Hand Puppet from a Plastic Glove

Leaf Turkeys

Handprint Turkeys for bulletin boards or to take home

Turkey Pins

Thanksgiving Collages

Colorful Turkeys

Lessons:

Poem of Thanksgiving

Reading lesson

Graphing Favorite Thanksgiving foods

Measurement

Indians/Thanksgiving

*All of these activites and lessons can be found on The Lesson Plan Page

School Supplies

It’s time to reevaluate your school supply closet and figure out how to introduce safer, more environmentally friendly pens, paints and tissues into the mix.

1. Use water-based paints: The Green Guide recommends using water-based paints for a non-toxic creative project.
2. Green art projects: This list of green art projects are all good for the environment, and some utilize natural ingredients and products like clay and wood.
3. Use green tissues: These Seventh Generation brand tissues are chlorine-free, so they aren’t a threat to the ozone layer and have no dyes or artificial fragrances.
4. Make your own cleaning kit: Free your students of breathing in harmful chemicals and help the environment by whipping up your own batch of non-toxic, environmentally friendly cleaning supplies.
5. Stock your room with green school supplies: If you or your school’s budget can afford it, stock your room with green school supplies, like recycled notebook binders and biodegradable corn starch pens.
6. Write with recycled pencils: This number two pencil is also made of recycled wood.
7. Acid-free glue stick: For all your art projects, use acid-free glue stick, which is less messier than liquid glue and better for the environment.
8. Take Classes Online: Attending accredited online universities saves both in the travel resources as well as the energy costs of the brick and mortar system.
9. Recharge batteries: Rechargeable batteries can save the earth from harmful metals and compounds that can’t be broken down when you toss out old batteries.

Grade Level: 3

Subject(s):                                                 

• Science/Botany

Duration: 50 minutes

Description: Students learn about the various parts of a plant by looking at a live plant, listening to a story, Jack’s Garden , and researching on the computer. Following their research, students construct a mobile of plant parts, identifying each part and its function. Through reading and writing extensions, students will read facts for comprehension and literature for interest. Each student will organize their ideas to write a short composition addressing a single topic: plants in their life.

Goals:

1. Students will be able to follow directions.
2. Student will be able to organize facts, identify parts of a plant, and label parts of a plant.
3. Students will be able to work cooperatively as a team to hypothesize, research, and share their findings.

Objectives:

1. Students will be able to identify and label the following parts of a plant: root, stem, leaf, bud, and flower.
2. Students will be able to explain the function of each part of a plant.

Materials:

• Jack’s Garden by Henry Cole
• CD-ROM: First Connections: The Golden Book Encyclopedia
• teacher-made patterns of plant parts (each part is hole-punched)
• teacher-made poster of plant parts (matches plant part patterns)
• celery sticks
• glass with water
• food coloring
• live plant(s)
• various books on plants and plant life (fiction and non-fiction)
• yarn
• markers
• hangers
• tape
• scissors
• computers, if available

Vocabulary:

1. Stem – Part of a plant that supports other parts, such as leaves, flowers, buds; part of a plant that carries water and nutrients from the ground to other plant parts.
2. Root – Underground part of a plant which serves to anchor the plant in place; also delivers water and nutrients from the ground to the stem.
3. Leaf – Lateral outgrowth from the stem whose primary function is food manufacturing.
4. Bud – An incompletely opened flower.
5. Flower – Part of a plant that is usually colorful and protrudes from the stem; serves in reproduction.

Procedure:
(Before beginning the lesson, make sure you bring in at least one live plant for the classroom.) Ask students, "Do you have plants at home? What has a plant done for you today? How do plants help us?" Acknowledge students’ answers and continue. Introduce the plant you have brought in. Ask students if they can name any and/or all of the parts of the plant. Using student input, write only the part (not the function) on the board. Ask, "Do you know what each part does?" Write students’ responses on the board.

Read Jack’s Garden to the class — reviewing, locating, and pointing out the plant parts and their functions as discussed in the introduction.

Inform students that they will be constructing a plant mobile. Group the students into five different groups: roots, stems, leaves, buds, and flowers. On a large table, scatter the various "plant parts" (have enough parts for each student to have one of each part). Have students individually collect the five different parts of the plant that they will need to complete their mobile. Each student will also need a hanger and five pieces of yarn cut at 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 inch lengths. Instruct students that they are to complete the following: (these instructions may be written on the board):

• Properly label each of the five plant parts on the line provided on each part.
• Attach each part to the yarn to be hung on the mobile, in the order that the part exists in nature (that is, roots are the lowest part, so that part will go on the 10” piece of yarn, 8” is the stem, 6” is the leaf, 4” is the bud, and 2” is the flower).
• On the back of each part, there are two lines numbered 1. and 2. On line number 1, write the function of this part of the plant. On line number 2, write an interesting fact about this part of the plant.

Groups will have 5-10 minutes of computer time to research their assigned part and find an interesting fact about that part to share with the class. While one group of students is at the computer, the other students will be compiling their plant parts onto the hangers to create the mobiles. Students who finish before the others may read the plant books that have been brought in. Students should have completed their mobile, labeled each part, and filled in line 1 on each part. Students in each group will have an entry for line 2 for the part that they researched. At this time, each group will share their findings from their research on the computer (in regards to their assigned part) with the rest of the class, so that all students have an entry for line 2 on the back of each part. As the information is shared, acknowledge, repeat, and reinforce the responses from the students. Write their responses on the board next to the names of the parts that were written on the board during the introduction.

In closing, remind students of their hypotheses regarding the celery experiment. Show students the celery from today and last night. Ask students to share their observations. Were their hypotheses correct? As an extension, have students write a story in their journals about how plants are a part of their life.

Assessment: Students’ understanding of the parts of a plant and each part’s function may be evaluated by looking at the mobile created by each student. Parts should be labeled properly, and a function of each part should be properly noted on the back. In addition to completing the mobile, it is important for students to follow the directions for this activity and to work in cooperation with other members in their group. (refer to the rubric listed in the Materials section)

Vocabulary:

1. Stem – Part of a plant that supports other parts, such as leaves, flowers, buds; part of a plant that carries water and nutrients from the ground to other plant parts.
2. Root – Underground part of a plant which serves to anchor the plant in place; also delivers water and nutrients from the ground to the stem.
3. Leaf – Lateral outgrowth from the stem whose primary function is food manufacturing.
4. Bud – An incompletely opened flower.
5. Flower – Part of a plant that is usually colorful and protrudes from the stem; serves in reproduction.

Procedure:
(Before beginning the lesson, make sure you bring in at least one live plant for the classroom.) Ask students, "Do you have plants at home? What has a plant done for you today? How do plants help us?" Acknowledge students’ answers and continue. Introduce the plant you have brought in. Ask students if they can name any and/or all of the parts of the plant. Using student input, write only the part (not the function) on the board. Ask, "Do you know what each part does?" Write students’ responses on the board.

Read Jack’s Garden to the class — reviewing, locating, and pointing out the plant parts and their functions as discussed in the introduction. After reading the story, review the various plant parts by using the poster as a model.

To further emphasize the function of the stem, conduct a “celery experiment." (At home the night before, soak some celery stalks in colored water for varying lengths of time. Do not show these to the students yet!) Bring out a glass filled with colored water and a celery stalk. Ask students, "If this piece of celery represents the stem of a plant, what will happen when it is placed in this glass of colored water?" Students should be able to hypothesize what the celery might look like according to the function of the stem. Write students’ hypotheses on the board. Let students know that you will be coming back to this activity later in the lesson.

Inform students that they will be constructing a plant mobile. Group the students into five different groups: roots, stems, leaves, buds, and flowers. On a large table, scatter the various "plant parts" (have enough parts for each student to have one of each part). Have students individually collect the five different parts of the plant that they will need to complete their mobile. Each student will also need a hanger and five pieces of yarn cut at 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 inch lengths. Instruct students that they are to complete the following: (these instructions may be written on the board):

• Properly label each of the five plant parts on the line provided on each part.
• Attach each part to the yarn to be hung on the mobile, in the order that the part exists in nature (that is, roots are the lowest part, so that part will go on the 10” piece of yarn, 8” is the stem, 6” is the leaf, 4” is the bud, and 2” is the flower).
• On the back of each part, there are two lines numbered 1. and 2. On line number 1, write the function of this part of the plant. On line number 2, write an interesting fact about this part of the plant.

Groups will have 5-10 minutes of computer time to research their assigned part and find an interesting fact about that part to share with the class. While one group of students is at the computer, the other students will be compiling their plant parts onto the hangers to create the mobiles. Students who finish before the others may read the plant books that have been brought in. Students should have completed their mobile, labeled each part, and filled in line 1 on each part. Students in each group will have an entry for line 2 for the part that they researched. At this time, each group will share their findings from their research on the computer (in regards to their assigned part) with the rest of the class, so that all students have an entry for line 2 on the back of each part. As the information is shared, acknowledge, repeat, and reinforce the responses from the students. Write their responses on the board next to the names of the parts that were written on the board during the introduction.

In closing, remind students of their hypotheses regarding the celery experiment. Show students the celery from today and last night. Ask students to share their observations. Were their hypotheses correct? As an extension, have students write a story in their journals about how plants are a part of their life.

Assessment: Students’ understanding of the parts of a plant and each part’s function may be evaluated by looking at the mobile created by each student. Parts should be labeled properly, and a function of each part should be properly noted on the back. In addition to completing the mobile, it is important for students to follow the directions for this activity and to work in cooperation with other members in their group. (refer to the rubric listed in the Materials section)

Take the class to a nearby park, by walking there. The students can examine the local ecosystems. They can see in their own neighborhood how what they do can either hurt or help the environment directly around them. The trip can be taken a step further to even help clean up the park. By walking to the park, the trip won’t cause extra exhaust emissions from a big school bus.

Tip #5 Start a Class Website

Teachers can start a class website to cut back on paper being used in the classroom. The teacher can post the homework on the site and students can post their homework to the site as well. If parents have questions or concerns for the teacher, instead of sending in a note they can post their email in a private discussion box. The teacher can also post discussion questions for the students and they can respond back or the students can play with interactive study guides. Constructing a class website will save paper being used in the classroom, and if enough classrooms participate in this tip, it could turn into saving trees.

-Pick out or make a costume that will be safe. Make sure that it fire-proof and the eye holes should be large enough for good peripheral vision.

-Make sure that if your costume requires a prop, that the tips are smooth and flexible enough that they will not hurt you are anyone else.

-If you are helping carve the pumpkin, not to use the knife. It is a good idea to buy a kit with the tools in it, they are still sharp not as much as a kitchen knife. It is an even better idea that  you scoop out the insides and draw the face and the parent will cut it out.

-Having a fun Halloween dinner before heading out to Trick-or-Treat will prevent you from eating your candy before your parents have a chance to check it all.

-Knowning basic everyday safety such as not getting into cars or talking to strangers, watching both ways before crossing streets and crossing when the lights tell you to, will help make Trick or Treating safer.

The Teacher’s Corner Website has many activities for your students to do in the classroom, if your school allows celebrating Halloween. The site has crossword puzzles, match up worksheets, journaling activities, coloring pages, and so much more.