At story time recently we read Sam Swope's and Sue Riddle's book called "Gotta Go! Gotta Go!" and found out that monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico for the winter. The butterflies that we are release this month will fly over two thousand miles to the overwintering sites in the Sierra Madre mountains in Michoacan, Mexico.
Our kindergarten class is taking part in the University of Kansas' Monarch Watch's tag and release program http://www.monarchwatch.org. Before we release our butterflies we hand-feed them and attach a small sticker to the hind wing of each butterfly. Each sticker has a special code that is recorded here at Friends School Haverford and sent to Monarch Watch. We learned to identify males and females based on the markings on the hind wings. This information is helpful to researchers, too. If one of our tagged butterflies is found along the migration route or in Mexico this winter, the information from the tag is again recorded and sent to the university. The university has an extensive data base that is used to track the migration patterns of the monarchs.
Over the next six weeks kindergarten will be following the southward migration of the Monrach butterflies with online maps and migration updates on Journey South's website: http://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/
Stay tuned!
