Watch a monarch butterfly grow from a single egg into a migrating adult in this interactive life cycle lesson for grades K through 8. Students click through each stage on a life cycle dial, seeing real photographs of the egg on a milkweed leaf, the striped caterpillar, the jade chrysalis, and the finished butterfly, with the four youngest grades tracing four stages and older students following six. From there the lesson moves into the part most butterfly units skip: the four generations that carry the species north each spring, and the remarkable super generation born in late summer that lives for months instead of weeks and flies thousands of miles to overwinter in Mexico. Every reading passage, vocabulary set, and discussion question adjusts to the grade band a teacher selects, so the same page works for a kindergarten circle time and an eighth grade life science class.
