One Very Fine Day

That right there is one of my new favorite things. It’s a butterfly life cycle game, hand-made for me by Mr. P’s kindergartener’s at Brookwood School, a replica of the set they keep in their classroom for students to challenge themselves with. The idea is to mix all the tiles up with your eyes closed, have a friend set a timer, and wait for that friend to shout, “Go!” Then you open your eyes and try to put the life cycle pictures in the correct order as quickly as you can.

The reigning butterfly life cycle tile game champion in Mr. P’s class is a young man named Porter, and he had looked a little nervous on Friday when his class challenged me to try and beat his time of 7.56 seconds.

He needn’t have been. I did not come even close to beating his time. That game is harder than it looks! These kindergarteners are great sports, though, and they gave me a second chance.

Once again, not even close.

So—this is the part that is making me smile as I type—those generous little souls spent a part of the rest of their day making me my own set of butterfly life cycle tiles. A remedial game set, they told me, in which they drew the caterpillar stages extra carefully because those were the tiles I kept putting in the wrong order. “Now you can practice at home,” they said.

And you know what? Porter did not look at all nervous this time.

“By the time you come back, Mrs. Burns, I’ll probably be in fourth grade,” he told me. “I’ll be even faster by then.”

Thank you to all the kindergarteners at Brookwood School, to their teachers, to librarian Sheila Geraty, to all the staff and administrators who’ve built such a vibrant learning community and then invited me to be part of it for a day. I got at least as much as I gave. Considering the way I feel every time I look at the new butterfly life cycle tile game sitting on the desk beside me, I’d say quite a bit more.

Three cheers for monarchs! Three cheers for learning! Three cheers for kindergarteners!

Okay. I’m off to practice …

FITBBC Recommendation: Flight Behavior

 

Flight Behavior
by Barbara Kingsolver
(Harper, 2012)

One of my favorite facets of the Fill-in-the-Blank Book Club is that participants can read whatever sort of book they like: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, graphic novels. And they can choose books that are written for adults or for children. It’s all up to you! The only guideline, really, is that the book in question have some relation to our monthly theme. Our inaugural meeting will happen in person in Massachusetts and online everywhere on Tuesday October 24, and our topic, as many of you know, is insects.

I’ve already recommended some children’s nonfiction and children’s poetry, so today I’m going to shake things up and share an adult novel that fits the theme beautifully. Barbara Kingsolver’s FLIGHT BEHAVIOR is the story of an Appalachian community touched by a mysterious invasion of butterflies. Some people see the presence of the butterflies as a miracle, others fear it’s a sign of impending doom. This is a gorgeous novel, full of the complicated characters living in a complicated world, and their experiences will stay with readers long after the book is finished.

The invasion of monarch butterflies depicted in the novel is fictional, but the butterfly behavior is completely real. Every winter, millions of monarch butterflies in eastern North America undertake an incredible migration. They end up, somehow, together in a handful of remote mountaintop locations in central Mexico. I was lucky enough to visit several of these sites when working on the book Citizen Scientists, and I can tell you they are astonishing to witness. Here’s a video peak, which doesn’t do the live sight justice, but will give you just a taste.