Story Time – Owly & Wormy, Friends All Aflutter!

“Story Time” will be a recurring feature on Mommy Nature, introducing children’s books with a nature theme.  Watch for them in the future to help expand your child’s library!

Story Time – Owly & Wormy, Friends All Aflutter!, written and illustrated by Andy Runton

Last week, my daughter’s preschool class focused on butterflies.  They learned about a butterfly’s life cycle and made a butterfly craft.  I can only imagine the stories my daughter may have told as a three year old butterfly expert, since she was a monarch butterfly for Halloween last year and one of her earliest toy sets was made-up of models of the life cycle.  She and I have also made up a story about her and butterflies that she asks me to tell on an almost daily basis now.  And perhaps she recalled a favorite book we found at the library a few months ago titled, Owly & Wormy, Friends All Aflutter!

This is an excellent book for pre-readers as it has very few words and cartoon style illustrations.  In fact, it relies on pictures to tell its story.  The book is very well illustrated, giving the reader enough information to follow the story, but still leaving a little to interpretation and the imagination. It is a perfect book to help pre-readers understand the story through its illustrations and hopefully will help a child use pictures in other books to facilitate learning to read words.

In this book, Owly and Wormy are friends who really want to attract butterflies to their garden.  They learn that they need special plants to attract butterflies, so they go to a garden center and purchase a milkweed plant.  With expectations of attracting several butterflies, they are disappointed to find that two eggs were laid on the plant that hatched into two very hungry caterpillars, who start eating Owly and Wormy’s beloved milkweed!  Soon Owly and Wormy grow to love the caterpillars, but just then the caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies.  Owly and Wormy don’t understand and think the caterpillars have just gone away.  They wait and wait for the caterpillars to return, but the caterpillars never do.  The story teaches about the life cycle of the butterfly through Owly and Wormy’s discoveries.  And since the book is predominantly a series of illustrated pictures, the story can be told with the help of your child.  By asking your son or daughter what happens in each sequential picture, you help your child develop reasoning skills!

Supplies

There are numerous crafts you can do to supplement any butterfly lesson, of course.  My daughter and I decided to make yarn and bead butterflies this week.  We used pipe cleaners, yarn, beads, and the cardboard from a roll of toilet paper. 

Winding Yarn

I cut the pipe cleaners in half, while my daughter wound about a yard of yarn around the cardboard from a roll of toilet paper.  Then she picked out four to five beads and strung them on one half of a bent pipe cleaner (hint – make sure bead holes are large enough to be easily strung on a pipe cleaner by your preschooler). 

Stringing Beads

Then I carefully slid the yarn off the toilet paper cardboard, making sure I didn’t overlap any of the loops of yarn, and placed the middle of the yarn loops inside the bent pipe cleaner.  Next, I twisted the two ends of the bent pipe cleaner as close to the last bead as possible to make a tight fit and to make the antennae.  Then, I fluffed up the yarn to look like the wings of a butterfly!  These could be used as spring decorations anywhere in the house, or attach a magnet to the back of some of them with tacky glue to put on the refrigerator.  I added a hair clip to one and made a barrette, which my daughter wore with pride all day!  She also just enjoyed playing with the butterflies, as you might guess.

Butterfly Craft

Please let me know if you’ve come across a gem of a story for children about nature.  You’re welcome to tell me a little about the book and why you like it.  Books are always a favorite for young children; and I, like many of you, am always looking for the perfect addition for my daughter’s bookshelf. 

Butterfly Barrette