For her final post on the blog, Namrata Kulkarni, shares about the joy her students felt when they had the opportunity to take care of baby butterflies. She shares details about their thoughtful, imaginative ways in doing so. -Ed.

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The EE recently got gifted a handful of butterfly babies to take care of. The excitement to take care of them gave birth to some pretty magical creations in my classroom. The babies got delivered on Thursday morning and by Thursday end of day, my class not only had a spot for them to live in but also started to build them a habitat. Considering they are still in their larva/chrysalis stage, we started off by first drawing our observations of them, lest we forget how tiny they were when we got them! Next, we educated ourselves about how to take care of them. Very helpful videos guided us through their larva-chrysalis-caterpillar-butterfly stage. Lastly, we decided to build them a habitat. We made flowers, waterfalls (because butterflies love to sit on the side of waterfalls and watch), slides to play on, a laptop for working, lots of beds, a tree, some blankets as well as some tables and chairs for them to have meals on. Once their spot looked full and vibrant, a young 4-year-old walked over and said “Namu, don’t you think we should write the butterflies an I love you note? It will make them so happy” and hence started a letter writing movement! We used an old chest like box for notes, put a sign on it saying ‘write notes to us!’ and filled it in no time. The imagination, creativity and empathy has been a pleasure to see and talk about with my kids. This weekend, the butterflies left the class a reply in their mailbox. We cannot wait to find out if they loved our beds, used our laptop and sat by the waterfall!