LITTLE CURRENT—Little Current Public School early childhood educator Janet McCarville and her Kindergarten charges gathered before the Little Current Public School student body assembly recently to bring the plight of the monarch butterfly to the fore.
Monarch butterflies have been under tremendous stress in recent years as the combination of pesticides and a relentless war on the milkweed pod, the key to the iconic butterfly’s amazing migration from Mexico to Manitoulin and beyond, have brought the once ubiquitous brightly coloured insect to the brink of disaster.
Ms. McCarville’s class raised a pair of monarch butterflies from eggs garnered by the educator during an expedition to Providence Bay and hatched in the classroom terrarium, through the spinning of a chrysalis, to bidding the intrepid continental travellors safe flight to Mexico from the schoolyard last fall.
In studying the insects, the young students learned of the threats facing their tiny friends. With images displayed on a screen in the school gym, their tiny voices implored their older compatriots to do their part in helping the insects survive into the new millennium. The student’s address to the assembly can be seen in its entirety online at The Expositor website www.manitoulin.ca. The plight of the monarch is being highlighted at Ontario Science Centres and in similar institutions across Canada in a film called ‘The Flight of the Butterflies,’ a trailer for which can be found at www.flightofthebutterflies.com.
