Gail Gibbons has explained the natural world to primary graders for four decades, and this is the version a child writes in. Forty eight pages of drawing, coloring, tracing and sorting walk through the monarch life cycle in order: egg, caterpillar, pupa, butterfly, then the migration that sends the last generation of the year thousands of miles south.

The activities do double duty. A child sorts monarchs from lookalikes and practices reading and writing at the same time, and the workbook is built against Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core, which is why it holds up as kindergarten homeschool science rather than a coloring book with a butterfly on it.

It also includes step by step instructions for raising a monarch, and a young naturalist certificate at the end for the child who finishes. The cover marks it grades K to 1; the publisher's own guidance is ages 4 to 8, and it pairs directly with Gibbons' picture book Monarch Butterfly for a child who wants the reading and the doing.