The second grade teachers at our school have adopted the butterfly garden to correspond with our life cycle correlate in our curriculum guide. We raise black swallowtails from eggs found along our fence row, in our herb garden, and in the butterfly garden. We even refrigerate the chrysalises that were created throughout the winter and released mature black swallowtails to the nature center in the spring. We raise and release monarchs in the fall. Every year we also tag monarchs for the University of Kansas Monarch Watch program.
Students can even take home tagging kits to tag with their families.
You might think 5 acres is a large area to maintain. We created a summer club of students, teachers, and parent volunteers who meet Monday evenings each week to weed and work on nature center projects. They proudly wear their Jr. Naturalists shirts to school. The local Kiwanis Club and Lady Elks have their own gardens which they maintain in our nature center. We also have the juvenile offenders, under the supervision of the local juvenile offenders coordinator, doing the heavy labor to work their required juvenile offender hours.