In honor of Eric Carle’s birthday I wanted to share some of my favorite activities for my favorite book – The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Here are a few activities to supplement this wonderful story:
- Have the children pretend to be caterpillars and act out turning into a butterfly. Have them curl up in a ball to represent being an egg. Have them crawl out of the eg as a caterpillar and look for food. They can act out eating the foods from the book. You can test their recall of the story by having them list the foods the caterpillar ate or introduce sequencing by listing the foods in order. Finally have the children crawl under a blanket or sheet and wrap them up to resemble the cocoon. Pull the sheet off of them and have them fly around the room like a butterfly flapping their arms (wings).
- Create a caterpillar to butterfly puppet that acts out the story. To create the puppet you will need a sock and some fabric or felt and wiggly eyes. To create the caterpillar put the sock on your hand and glue wiggly eyes and stripes cut out from the fabric on it to resemble a caterpillar. To create the butterfly, turn the sock inside out and glue wings and antennaes on the inside of the sock to resemble a butterfly. You can also cut out the food pieces from the story out of construction paper. While telling the story put the sock on your hand to display the caterpillar side and have him “eat” the various foods from the story. Then pull the sock inside out to resemble a ball for the cocoon, then turn it the rest of the way inside out to show the other side of the sock that has the wings for the butterfly.
- Children can create their own Caterpillar to Butterfly books by cutting apart the pictures below and putting them in the correct sequence. Staple the pictures together to create a book.
Another favorite book is Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?. Here is a wonderful class book activity that helps beginning readers and quickly becomes a class favorite because the children are the stars of the book!
- Take individual pictures of each child in the class and the teacher. Take a class picture as well. To create the book start off with the teacher’s picture and put the following text below it “Ms. ______________, Ms. _____________, who do you see?” see example below:
On the next page put one of the student’s pictures with the following text “I see (student’s name) looking at me! (student’s name), (student’s name), who do you see?”
Continue in this manner for all of the students in the class. The final picture should have the class picture with the following text “I see the whole class looking at me!”
