The amazing team of  Dianna Aston and Sylvia Long deliver another picture book masterpiece with their third book A Butterfly is Patient.

This year we have shared An Egg is Quiet (as part of our learning about birds) and A Seed is Sleepy (to supplement our plants/seeds/gardens learning) With both titles we used a modified version of Adrienne Gear‘s Knew-New Connections from her Non-Fiction Reading Power book to represent our learning.

Students were excited to share this book as many had learned about butterflies or even hatched butterflies in their Kindergarten or Grade 1 years and so they had a lot of prior knowledge to connect to their new learning and they were able to represent all of this background knowledge under “I KNEW this already!”

A butterfly is helpful (fantastic pollinators)

What is lovely about representing our knowledge on a sheet like this is that it is very open ended. It allows students to document their own learning from exactly where they start. There are no “right” answers. Some facts ended up on “This is NEW to me!” and for others, these same facts were included on, “I KNEW this already!” Being familiar with the sheet allowed students to start organizing their thinking as we read. There were comments like, “Wow. I didn’t know that!” or “Hey that is what we learned last year. Remember how we talked about . . . ” When it came time to write, everyone had lots to say!

Describing prior knowledge and new learning.

Another student example of all the new things he learned today.

Some other student examples from “I KNEW this already!”

*Butterflies help plants make new plants (pollinate)

*I knew that some butterflies have spots that look like eyes on their wings

*They molt (shed their skin)

*I knew they started out as an egg

*Butterflies make chrysalises. They don’t make cocoons

Information shared for “This is NEW to me!”

* I found out that they taste with their feet

*I did not know that butterflies can be poisonous

*I didn’t know that a peacock butterfly can make a hissing sound by rubbing its wings

* I discovered that they drink water from mud puddles

* I didn’t know that butterflies could get water from wet soil