Entertain Your Child with Butterfly Watching
Small children who are scared of insects will often learn to welcome the butterfly. It's one of the safest, most gentle insects that provide beauty and grace to enlighten our world.
You can start your butterfly watching journey with introducing your child to books about the butterfly. Some good books include: Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (for ages 4 to 8 and very popular), Stokes Butterfly Book ($15), Butterfly Alphabet by Kjell Bloch, Butterfly Book: An Easy Guide to Butterfly Gardening, Identification, and Behavior by Donald Stokes, Ernest Williams, and Lillian Stokes, Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer's Guide by Rick Cech, and Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly by Laurence Pringle. These are only a few that are available on the market.
If you can't afford to buy your own books about the butterfly, you could visit the local library and ask for help finding books on butterflies and children's stories about them. If you have a limited budget, try a local bookstore or garage sales and flea markets.
You could enlighten your own knowledge about butterflies to help gain understanding of what to teach your child. There are butterfly clubs all over the United States. There are festivals, gardens that encourage butterfly watching, museums, zoos, societies. Your ability to find interesting information is limitless, especially if you have access to the internet. You can even gain access to the internet by libraries that participate in offering computer usage to the public.
You may want to start your child off on his butterfly watching journey by encouraging artwork that involves the butterfly. Playdoh sets, puzzles, painting kits, color books, and toys are easy to find.
People who enjoy butterfly watching would most likely also enjoy decorations for their home that include pictures or sculptures of some sort of the butterfly. Curtains, bedspreads, sheets, paintings, containers, and bathroom accessories are only naming a few of the decorating possibilities.
Butterflies are not limited to the United States. You might enjoy starting a collection of memorabilia from all over the world. Butterfly watching is popular in Canada, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and many more places. Any place that has the ability to grow beautiful nectar-producing flowers will most likely have butterfly visitors.
If your child does who an unusual interest in butterflies, they could prepare for careers later in life that involve these tiny creatures. Photography, authors, naturalists, scientists, teachers, museums, zoos, artists, gardeners, entomologists, biologists, and people who work in parks and with gardens all enjoy careers that involve butterflies.
If you want to help your child learn to encourage a butterfly population, it's important to meet the insect's survival needs. Respect for their privacy, their need to breed, a place to hide for safety, water, shelter, and food are all important. Make your yard healthy before trying to add to it. If you want to be successful with your butterfly watching, you must also be willing to try your hand at gardening to get the most benefit and the butterflies. It's a safe way to help your child commune with nature.
