Feel free to share this page with others. All of our articles are from a Christian perspective, honoring God as the Creator of all things in nature. We do not subscribe to any aspect of macroevolution at any level. Our focus is on the incredible genius of our Creator, and the artistic beauty of the things He created, as well. Artistic Nature Magazine We share Bible verses and devotionals in every issue, focusing on discipleship and contentment. Plus we often include photography, carefully chosen Web sites, and assignments in other school subjects such as music, math, language arts, health, P.E. and more. Each issue also includes fun activity pages, such as mazes, word puzzles, dot to dots, word search puzzles, crossword puzzles, and more, for an age span of grades 2-9. We have something for the whole family. A few of our art assignments are suitable for high school. Smaller children may enjoy coloring some of our pages simply. Artistic Nature Magazine costs only $22 per year for 4 quarterly issues in PDF format. For over 80 pages per issue, this price can't be beat! Plus you get to print out any page for any child living in your same household, indefinitely. Our specific coloring instructions include what types of strokes to use (smooth, jagged, short, long, straight or curved) and the colors to use for best effect. We also teach shading techniques. We recommend that you buy color sets with at least 25 to 50 colors for best results. with Joy Marie Dunlap Brief, entertaining articles on specific nature topics Delightful coloring pages, your kids can learn from as they color, using our careful and creative coloring instructions for grades 4-9. A colored example of most coloring pages for kids to use for reference as they color. Kid-friendly paintings by famous artists to help kids learn new art techniques through simple discussions. We include so many art experiences in each 80- to 100-page magazine that a one year's subscription to Artistic Nature Magazine provides you with more than a year's worth of art curriculum in grades 4-9. Your kids will learn to color in ways that create a 3-dimensional, textured effect, plus learn art principles that are used all the time by great artists. Our nature articles can be used as part of your kids' grade school science (grades 3-6), and are interesting enough for grades 7 to 9 to enjoy as well. Past issue topics include: gardening, nesting birds, N. American scenery, sea mammals, N. American deserts, animal homes, Australian animals, ocean fish, insect lifecycles, and Antarctic & Arctic wildlife. All back issues still sold as homeschool unit studies. Types of colors that can be used for the art in this magazine: Regular Crayons, Twist-up Crayons, Colored Pencils, Watercolor Pencils, Fine Tip Markers, Regular Markers, Oil Pastel Crayons, Watercolor Paint Please be aware that every child is unique. This means that different children will be ready to color at different levels, and each will go at their own pace. Encourage your child to follow any and all coloring instructions that he understands and is ready for. Feel free to reprint any art assignment that doesn't seem like his best. Feel free, also, to go back to a previous art page later, if desired. Don't expect perfection. No artist is perfect.
4, 5 Watching Baby Butterflies Grow - our story 6 Painted Lady Life Cycle & Migration 7 Painted Lady Coloring Page & Facts 8 Fun Activity Page and Bookmark 9 Butterfly Poem & Painting 10 Butterflies and How They Grow 11 Tiger Swallowtail Coloring Page 12, 13 Life Cycle Decoding Activity 14 Tiger Swallowtail Facts & Painting 15 Rose Vase Painting & Discussion 16, 18 Monarch Life Cycle, Migration, Links 17 Monarch Life Cycle Coloring Page 18 Chenille Wire Caterpillar Craft 19 Butterfly Pairs Matching Activity 20 Viceroy Facts & Mosquito Hunt 21 Monarch & Viceroy Differences 22 Viceroy Coloring Page 23 Black Swallowtail Life Cycle & Activity 24, 25 Caterpillar Decoding Activity 26 Zebra Longwing Fact Page 27 Zebra Longwing Coloring Page 28 Gulf Fritillary Fact Page 29 Gulf Fritillary Coloring Page 30 Question Mark Butterfly Fact Page 31 Question Mark Coloring Page 32 Metalmark Facts and Drawing Lesson 33 Painting & Hidden Insect Search 34 Buckeye Fact Page & Devotional 35 Buckeye Butterfly Coloring Page 36 Grow Your Own Butterfly Garden 37 Lesson of the Butterfly Devotional 38 Butterfly & Flower Decorated Cakes 38 Juniper Hairstreak Fact Page 39 Juniper Hairstreak Coloring Page 40 Flower Painting & Insect Hunt 41 Harvester Butterfly & Word Puzzle 42 Mourning Cloak Coloring Page 43 Mourning Cloak Fact Page 44 Stained Glass Creative Coloring 44 Symmetry Lesson & Activity Artistic Nature Magazine July-August 2010 45 Still Life Painting & Insect Hunt 46, 47 Butterfly Creative Coloring Pages 48 Butterfly Kaleidoscope & Art Lesson 49 Butterfly Word Search Puzzle 50, 51 Stained Glass Butterfly Coloring Pages 52 Moths, Luna Moth Facts 52 Butterfly & Moth Differences 53 Luna Moth Coloring Page 54 Advanced Dot-to-Dot Page 55 Moth & Butterfly Defenses, Sheep Moth 56 Hummingbird Hawk Moth 56, 57 Io Moth & Coloring Page 58 Double Moth Maze Activity 59 Find the Moth Pairs Activity 60 Dragonfly & Damselfly Coloring 61-62 Dragonfly, Mayfly Life Cycle 62-63 Dragonfly Chenille Wire Craft 64 Painting & Hidden Insects Hunt 65 Colorful Beetles Poem & Verses 66 Beetle Facts, Poem, Story, & Design 67 Beetle Design to Color Creatively 68 Beetle Life Cycle & Goliath Beetle 69 Goliath Beetle Coloring Page 70 Giant Stag Beetle & Activity 71 Giant Stag Beetle Coloring Page 72, 73 Color the Painting Activity 74 Cicada Life Cycle & Web Links 75 Grasshopper Family Fact Page 76, 77 Honey Bee Facts & Photos 78, 79 Honey Bee Coloring Pages 80 Pompom Bumblebee Craft 81 Bumblebee Coloring Page 82 Bumblebee Facts, Ant Devotional 83 Wasp & Hornet Life Cycles 84 Ant Nursery Article 85 Rotting Log Insect Nursery Activity 86 Mosquitoes, Diseases & Precautions 87 Butterfly Design to Color (goes with pg. 48) 88 Answer Key 89-92 Our 24 Delightful Penmanship Books www.lighthome.net/ebooks
When my kids were little, one of the things I did for our home school was to order caterpillars and watch them grow and change into butterflies. God created insects in a special way. When they are young, they look completely different than when they are grown up, almost like an entirely different creature. Those changes are what we will be exploring in this issue of Artistic Nature Magazine. God made each kind of insect unique and special. with different life stages. Butterflies lay eggs, which hatch into caterpillars that end up being butterflies. The caterpillars we ordered were quite small when they came in the mail, but they grew very quickly. They ate the goo they were crawling on and grew fatter and fatter. They were spiny and ugly, and they only got uglier and uglier. Then they each did a very strange thing. They made a thread that they connected to the top of the jar and hung there from a tiny thread that came out of their tail ends. Then they spun the threads around and around themselves and turned into something uglier still. They wrapped themselves up into an ugly little covering called a chrysalis (kriss-a-liss). They hung there for several days. We had to be careful not to bump the jar they were hanging inside because if the thread broke and they fell, that would be the end of that caterpillar. It would turn into a butterfly that couldn't fly. One of the kids did bump the jar once and one out of the four chrysalises fell off the jar lid. It became a butterfly but its wings did not develop right, so it was never able to fly. After a few days, the chrysalises began to wiggle. This meant they were ready to emerge. The new adult Insect Life Cycles, Including Butterflies 4 www.lighthome.net/ebooks
butterflies had to struggle hard to get out of their chrysalises. When they finally emerged, they were wet, and their wings were all wrinkled up. They stayed on the broken chrysalis for an hour, pumping their wings. Finally, their wings were dry, straight, and beautiful. Even our smallest child at that time, Jennaya, when she was a baby, got very excited whenever the butterflies flew around their box home (where we moved them after they became butterflies). Jennaya confused them with birds, and kept saying excitedly, "A buddaba! A birt!" Our kids put sugar water on their hands so that the butterflies could drink out of their hands. It was fun to see them feeling around with their feet and drinking straw-like proboscises to taste where the sugar was and drink it up. The hand-feeding they did was more bonding for the butterflies than we realized. After a few days, we let the butterflies go. They flapped their wings on the red coffee can lid we had put sugar-water in, then flew up, up, and away. A week later, we were taking a walk along a nearby riverbed when 4 painted lady butterflies hovered around our kids and then landed on their hands. The butterflies remembered those who had fed them. Article and photos by Joy Marie Dunlap Previous page photo (top) is of Joshua Dunlap (left) and Justin Dunlap (right) at ages 7 and 6 respectively. JOIN OUR LADYBUG HUNT Look for these ladybugs hidden throughout this issue. The first child, age 9 or under who gives us the correct number of ladybugs, without help, will get a free e-book. Older kids may join our mosquito hunt (for a prize) on page 20. Insect Life Cycles, Including Butterflies 5 www.lighthome.net/ebooks
VANESSA CARDUI The seed packets on this page show flowers that painted ladies like to lay their eggs on. Painted lady chrysalis and early stage caterpillar; as the caterpillars grow older they change to a gray and white plaid pattern with white hairs and white branched spines. The butterflies our family raised (two different years) were painted lady butterflies. (We raised them twice so that our younger kids could enjoy them better when older.) The second time we kept the butterflies an extra day or two, and some of them laid eggs on our back door window. The eggs were very tiny and clear. When they hatched the caterpillars were so tiny they were like tiny bits of threads humping along the way caterpillars do but almost too small to even notice. Later that year, the kids saw several painted lady butterflies in our backyard. Then they saw a few more and a few more, and a few more. We wondered what was happening when painted lady butterflies kept flying through our yard all day long, in ones and twos and threes. The kids did a little research on the Internet and found out that painted ladies migrate each spring. We kept seeing them for days. The funny thing was that no one else seemed to know anything about the butterfly migration. by Joy Marie Dunlap See what we saw, in these painted lady butterfly videos: Emergence: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkiu9ufwqmw&feature=related Migration: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1fvgz0bobg Insect Life Cycles, Including Butterflies 6 www.lighthome.net/ebooks
Eggs: ridged blue or green on leaf surfaces Laid on: favorite plant is thistle Caterpillar: gray and white plaid look, with white hairs and branched spines Habits: feast together hidden in silk webs Chrysalis: brown with gold spots Found: throughout North America Special fact: Sold for kids to raise because they can live on artificial food. Insect Life Cycles, Including Butterflies 7 www.lighthome.net/ebooks