MappingMonarchs
traveling stanzas
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OLD TRAIL SCHOOL
ShareYourVoice
Thread Community Poem
Respond to the model poem, then share your stanza on a growing map.
Emerge Erasure Poetry
Learn about Monarchs, then create your own Emerge erasure poem.
Listening Wall Poetry
Watch videos and interviews about Monarchs, then create your own poem out of them.
AboutTheProject
Mapping Monarchs
The idea for Mapping Monarchs grew out of an exchange between Old Trail School students in Ohio with students in Mexico through the Journey North community science program. With support from the GAR Foundation in 2022, Old Trail School partnered with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University to build an interactive website for the project and to lead poetry writing workshops for students to creatively explore their knowledge of this remarkable species. Mapping Monarchs now offers a platform for students anywhere to learn about monarch butterflies, engage with three different digital writing tools, and share their finished poems on a map depicting the monarch’s migration.
About the Monarch Butterfly
The monarch butterfly is one of the most recognizable and well studied butterflies on the planet. Its orange wings are laced with black lines and bordered with white dots. Famous for their seasonal migration, millions of monarchs migrate from the United States and Canada south to California and Mexico for the winter.
Range
Monarch butterflies are native to North and South America, but they’ve spread to other warm places where milkweed grows. No longer found in South America, monarchs in North America are divided into two main groups: The western monarchs, which breed west of the Rocky Mountains and overwinter in southern California; and the eastern monarchs, which breed in the Great Plains and Canada, and overwinter in Central Mexico. There are also populations in Hawaii; Portugal and Spain; and Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in Oceania.
Excerpted from the National Geographic website