An Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly

Written by Laurence Pringle and illustrated with paintings by Bob Marshall, An Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly gives readers a colorful look inside the life of a Monarch butterfly. This book informs the reader of the butterfly's life cycles and describes their migration patterns from Massachusetts to the Rio Grande, an amazing cross-continental flight that spans 2,500 hundred miles. The paintings are labeled and identify the parts of the insects and also illustrate the metamorphosis process from the caterpillar to the butterfly. I thought this was a very cool book and is perfect for young readers just beginning to learn about these insects, it provides them with tons of facts in a very readable format. I absolutely adored the illustrations as well!

This is a perfect book to use as a vocabulary dissection. Students would use the information in this book to create an info-graph or graphic organizer that describes and defines the Monarch butterfly. Students would use critical thinking skills to take away the main ideas from this book, such as: Feeding Habits, Predators, Life Cycle, Migration, Mating, etc, and pull important facts to assemble their graphic organizer. They could also draw anatomically correct illustrations of butterflies to accompany their graphic. Activities like this invite students to really become experts on a word(s) or species by examining a scientific text, interpreting the photographs and facts, and synthesizing it into another product.

Pringle, L. (1997). An extraordinary life: The story of a monarch butterfly. New York: Orchard Books.