February 2019 — How Kids Think Like Scientists: The Butterfly Edition
“But why?”
For a parent, babysitter, or children’s educator, this question probably sounds very familiar.
As adults, we are constantly sorting through the endless stream of incoming information and putting things into a huge network of neat little boxes. We know intuitively what information to keep, and what to discard because we’ve learned it before. We learn new things for a specific purpose: We want to fix a broken sink. We want to speak French. We want to prepare for a job interview.
Kids, on the other hand, are new to the world. They want to learn just for the sake of learning. Young brains are in a constant state of downloading new information. They take in everything, all at once, all the time. Every single new sensation, idea, factoid, and interaction is sucked up like water into a dry sponge. Starting around age 3, kids start to consciously take charge of their own learning experience, tirelessly seeking out new information to satisfy their curiosity. Maria Montessori — the famous children’s educator, whose method encourages students to learn through exploration, self-direction, and play—called this “the absorbent mind.”
Basically, kids are scientists from day one.
Science is all about exploration and discovery. Charles Darwin first discovered the idea of evolution by wondering how extinct animals could look so similar to animals roaming the earth today. Gregor Mendel founded modern genetics when he noticed that two green pea plants could somehow be parents to both a green and a yellow pea plant. Jane Goodall showed the world how smart chimpanzees are when the way they built tools out of twigs reminded her of humans.
Scientists, like children, are driven by questions that start with things like “I wonder,” “I notice,” and “This reminds me of something.”
This month, Curio Interactive is working on classroom material that uses these questions to help students learn about the butterfly life cycle. The material will use kids’ natural curiosity, encouraging them to ask these questions. “I wonder if baby butterflies look like adult butterflies?” “What do I notice about this butterfly’s chrysalis?” “What does this caterpillar remind me of?”
Real-life butterfly scientists ask these same kinds of questions in their work. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is a nonprofit organization that works to protect invertebrates and their habitats — like the famous monarch butterfly, a type of milkweed butterfly that declined a whopping 86% between 2017 and 2018 on the Pacific coast. The scientists at Xerces wanted to find out why.
Their research revolves around key questions that start out very similar to the ones asked by kids in the Curio Classroom.
Dr. Angela Laws, an ecologist and one of the monarch experts at Xerces, says they started out with a basic “I wonder” question:
What do monarchs do during the breeding season?
She says this spawned a whole slew of more specific wondering questions.
When do they arrive at certain locations?
How long do they stay?
When do they start breeding?
What kinds of plants are they using?
When do these different plants bloom in the spring?
Angela teamed up with other scientists to investigate these very questions. Angela’s colleague, conservation biologist Stephanie McKnight, spent her last two summers travelling around the west looking for monarchs. She soon noticed that tons of the butterflies were breeding in California. They started a citizen science effort, the Milkweed Mapper, where people help them collect more data on the butterflies, which they quickly realized was too much work for just one person.
From here, Angela and her colleagues asked the next kind of question:
What did we notice about the monarchs in California?
“One of the things we noticed is that unlike the eastern monarch population, the western monarchs seem to breed throughout their range for the whole breeding season,” Angela says.
In the east, the butterflies start breeding in the south in the spring, but it takes four whole generations for them to show up in the north in the late summer. Then, in August, they head back down to Mexico for the winter and the cycle starts all over again the following spring (check out the image to the left.)
But in the west, Stephanie noticed that while the monarchs still migrated from the south in the spring, some butterflies were breeding in the western states throughout the whole breeding season, all the way from March to November, and then settling down in California for the winter instead of heading to Mexico (check out the map below). “That was surprising because it was different from the eastern monarchs,” Angela says.
They also noticed that some species of milkweed plants, which provide food for the butterflies, showed up earlier in the spring than others. This means those plants could be really important for those butterflies that are just emerging from their winter sleep. But Angela says the monarchs’ favorite plants don’t actually start blooming until late in the spring, long after the butterflies come out.
“That has led us to wonder: What are the monarchs doing in the time between when they leave and when the milkweeds are available?”
The next step in their research is to answer that very question.
In this way, Angela and her fellow butterfly scientists are thinking just like kids. They spend their time looking for answers, being curious, making guesses, and exploring ideas. The job of the Curio Classroom is to encourage these kinds of questions, help kids pursue real answers in their quest for knowledge, and maybe even spawn a new generation of curious real-life butterfly scientists in the process!
