Butterfly Life Cycle and Metamorphosis: Wren and Sitka Nature Lesson, Grades 3-5
A caterpillar does not grow wings the way a child grows taller. It goes into a case, comes apart almost completely, and rebuilds. The caterpillar and the butterfly eat different food on purpose, so they are never competing for the same meal.
By the end of this
- Your child can name the four stages of complete metamorphosis and say why the caterpillar and butterfly eat different food
Your child is ready for this if they
- Reads a short paragraph without help
- Writes a sentence in their own words
- Will go outside and look at something for five minutes
That list matters more than the age we printed on it. You know which of the two is true of your child.
Some animals change shape completely on the way to being adults. Scientists call it metamorphosis, which means change of form.
A butterfly does it in four stages. Egg, then larva which we call a caterpillar, then pupa inside a chrysalis, then adult.
The caterpillar stage is the eating stage. It does almost nothing but feed and grow, shedding its skin several times because its skin does not stretch.
Inside the chrysalis, most of the caterpillar breaks down into a kind of soup, and special cells that were there all along build the butterfly. The adult that comes out has a completely different mouth, different legs, and eats completely different food.
Not every insect does this. A grasshopper hatches looking like a small grasshopper and just gets bigger. That is called incomplete metamorphosis.
What is inside
- 01The Complete Change — the teaching page
- 02The Complete Change — the work page, answerable from the teaching page
- 03Take it outside: Look at the underside of leaves on one plant.
Standards alignment, for a portfolio or a state filing
1 alignments. Copy what your state asks for and ignore the rest — this is here for the paperwork, not for the teaching.
| Framework | Code | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| NGSS | 3-LS1-1 |