To celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar we made a classroom display of the story. I made the sun and the moon and “In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf…”. The rest of the items for the story we made together with the class.

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The Caterpillar

You need: 

• Paper plates
• Green and red paint
• White paper to write the weekdays on
• Black and white copies of all the foods in the story
• Eyes and antennas from purple, yellow and green paper

We painted seven of the paper plates green and one red. I asked my preschool 2 students (all of them 4 yrs old or almost 4 at this time) to write the names of the weekdays to white paper from an example. For some of the kids I traced the name of the weekday with pencil and asked them to trace it with a marker. The weekdays were then glued on the paper plates. 

There was enough food items to ask the whole class to colour at least one. When the paper plates were dry we all sat together and started glueing the foods on to the plates according to the story. I was amazed how well the children remembered all the foods the caterpillar ate each day and how many of them. Great sequencing! 

The Butterfly

You need:

• Rounded strips from an A3 sized paper in three different lengths
• Markers
• Honeycomb paper for the body and head
• Pipe cleaner for legs and antennas

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I cut the strips of paper free hand from A3 paper. The round top is about 8-10cm and the bottom part that attaches to the butterfly is about 5-7cm. The longest was the whole long length of the A3 and the other two sizes about 10-12cm shorter. 

I gave each child in the class a strip and asked them to colour it with their favourite colours and as colourful as they possibly can. We did have the butterfly from the story out for an example at all times. This was actually a good in between activity whilst the kids were finishing lunch, going to the bathroom and then to play. I would invite them over to a table to make one of the strips before they went to play or in between playing, so it was a very free flow activity the kids greatly enjoyed. 

I prepared the body and glued on the strips for the wings trying to achieve the same shape as in the illustration in the book. I cut a piece of card in the same shape as the body and it was easy to glue on the strips in a fan shape and the honeycomb body onto it.  

Hint: if you pull a round pencil along the end of the strip it curls a bit 😉

Then we hung to whole thing in our classroom!

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