Love is Patient Butterfly Character Trait Homeschool Unit Study

 

I based this homeschool study on the first character trait of Love in 1 Corinthians 13: Patience. Look up the passage. In fact, I challenge you to read 1 Corinthians 13 with your family for Valentine's Day (check out my 1 Corinthians 13 Valentine's day wreath for a pretty decoration idea). If Valentine's day is about love, then it's especially important for my children to understand what real love is and 1 Corinthians 13 nicely lays it out for us.

 

It's interesting the more we study character traits, the more homeschooling has been refining my character as well as my children's! My patience is definitely something I could tinker for the better! What about yours? 

 

Originally, my sister inspired me to include Character First Education in our homeschooling. It's where you learn about an animal and a character trait that ties in with that animal. Here is a post about the resources we use for our character trait study. Plus until Sunday evening, you can still leave a comment on that blog post to win this character trait book Achieving True Success: How to Build Character As a Family! 

 

Character First Education provides some free resources on their website that have been helpful and you can include that in this homeschool study as well.

To kick off our Love is Patient Butterfly Character study, we read 1 Corinthians 13 (and made this wreath). We read this book about butterflies: Grow with Me: Butterfly that we picked up at the library. We talked about how caterpillars have to patiently grow in their chrysalis until they become butterflies and how waiting can make things better (i.e. food to cool off so it doesn't burn our tongue). Also how showing patience with our friends, family, and siblings shows them love. So if we truly love our neighbor, we must embrace patience!

Because my daughter is part kinesthetic learner, we role-played each stage of the butterfly. We rolled up like an egg, inched around on the ground like a caterpillar, stood very still like a chrysalis, then opened and fluttered our wings like a butterfly. (A great introduction to life cycles)

We then did a word search that I made with most of the vocabulary used in the book Grow with Me: Butterfly. You can print that word search here (for free!): Butterfly Word Search

To have some bonding time, I created a copy and trace coloring page for young kids and a "Mommy Meditation" page on 1 Corinthians 13 (also great for bigger kids who can read). The Mommy Meditation is a way you can lead by example! Get your color on and face-time with your children all while focusing on the word of God!

This Love is Patient Butterfly Trace, Copy and Color Butterfly Page (for young kids): write your name, copy and trace Love is Patient (after reading 1 Corinthians 13), and then color in your butterfly.

For the Mommy Meditation page: color as you like! I also suggest highlighting the word LOVE, then underlining in one color (I used gold) what love is, and underlining in another color (I used red to signify "stop") what love isn't.

Here is Big Blue Eyes and I after we colored our pages!

 

Love this girl! And learning together!

 

We also read page 70 "Monarch Miracle" in the book My Big Book of 5-minute Devotions and page 54 "Patience vs Restlessness" in Achieving True Success: How to Build Character As a Family (you can still win this book - details here).

 

Here is an outline of our unit study and resources below.

 

Language Arts

Love is Patient Butterfly Color and Copy

Butterfly Word Search

Mommy Meditation Page

 

Science

Butterfly Life Cycle Craft from Buggy and Buddy

Life Cycle of a Butterfly pasta activity from the Hildebrands

Comparing Types of Butterflies (or make a Venn diagram with 2 different types of butterflies)

 

Art

Painting B Butterflies: A lesson in Symmetry (I'll post this tomorrow)

Character First's Education Beautiful Butterfly Activity

 

Math

(I'll update this with a blog post tomorrow as well)

 

Resources

Character First Education for Patience page includes a poem, nature story, and song along with a few activity pages and a story of George Washington Carver. Check them out for some more free resources.

 

 

And a bible!
(Purchasing through the book links above can monetarily help/fund support Sweet Roots! I'm thankful to be an amazon affiliate!)

Please comment below if you decide to partake! I'd love to hear your thoughts and any other butterfly-related activities!

Thanks again, my dear readers!