Mapping Monarchs and the Miracle of Migration

Every autumn, millions of monarch butterflies migrate 3,000 miles from their breeding grounds in northeastern North America to spend the winter in the forests of southwestern Mexico. Each migration is by a new generation, so they cannot learn from others. Instead, they rely on their instincts.

To learn more about this curious pattern, Intermediate School students have been engaged in a year-long, multi-disciplinary citizen science project called Mapping Monarchs: Migration & Metaphor. Our thanks go to the GAR Foundation for supporting the project through the Educator Initiative Grant.

“As a science teacher, I often look to include hands-on lessons to help my students develop scientific skills and make meaningful connections to the world,” said Intermediate School science teacher Lynn Gregor. “This project accomplishes all this and more.”

The project’s roots can be traced back to last school year when Intermediate School students cleaned out six raised garden beds behind the school to plant milkweed and native plants to attract monarch butterflies to campus.

Then, in the fall, students went outdoors to find and document sightings of butterflies, caterpillars and eggs on a scientific website hosted by an organization called Journey North. One third grade class even had the opportunity to observe a butterfly hatching from a chrysalis in real-time before it was released into the wild.

To mimic the monarch’s migration pattern, students decorated paper symbolic monarch butterflies in art class, wrote letters in Spanish and mailed them to a school near the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Central Mexico. This sparked contextual conversations in Spanish class and reinforced the children’s geographic and cultural understanding of the migration.

Then, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, students blended all they had learned from their scientific studies with written expression in a cross-curricular workshop led by David Hassler, the director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.

“Mapping Monarchs brings together two disciplines that are sometimes seen as opposites—poetry and science—and capitalizes on children’s natural curiosity and wonder,” Gregor said.

Through the collaboration with Wick, students’ poems will be featured on a website that engages their peers in Mexico and elsewhere to read, respond and share their own reflections. Additionally, Wick’s new Mobile Makerspace Bus will travel to OTS to engage students in creative expression in the spring.

Added Gregor: “Through this project, we are helping students build empathy, understanding and connection while engaging their creative self-expression, digital placemaking and real-world conservation efforts.”

Dear Monarch,

You are a beautiful fish in the ocean of the sky. Your wings are like abstract art in a walking museum. I wish I could spread my wings and fly like you. How do you fly when you know you will not make it to the end.

BY BROOKLYN GILBERT ’27

Dear Monarch,

You are fragile flowers in the garden of the sky. How did you become strong, determined and stunningly beautiful? Share your secrets with us, and burst from your chrysalis.

Your wings are delicate orange paper, yet you travel so far. How do you do it? How do you fly through the tranquil, blue abyss that is the sky, travel so far to rest?

When you sleep in the Oyamel trees, it seems as if they are on fire. Teach us this great feat, show us the way through life.

BY MARIELLE MCGRATH ’27