The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Fiction, Year 2)

This is the book cover

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a children's picture book designed, illustrated and written by Eric Carle, first published in 1969. It features a caterpillar who eats its way through a wide variety of foodstuffs before pupating and emerging as a butterfly. The winner of many children's literatureawards and a major graphic design award, it has sold 30 million copies worldwide. It has been described as "one of the greatest childhood classics of all time."

The Very Hungry Caterpillar uses distinctive collage illustrations, 'eaten' holes in the pages and simple text with educational themes – counting, the days of the week, foods, and a butterfly's life stages. There have been a large number of related books and other products, including educational tools, created in connection to the book. You'll find an incredibly large amount of resources surfing the Internet. Of course, this book is also a recommended fiction story in our Curriculum Guidelines.

For this book, I created some activities. Some of them were created by me but the most were made together with some classmates - Alba, Mario and Laura.

THE BUTTERFLY CYCLE

Among the topics we can present to the children we have the butterfly's life stages. For this activity we used Kidspiration Software (you can find information about it in the post on Resources for the Literacy Classroom). In this activity, the children have to place the pictures in the correct order in the Picture View. This is my example:

Butterfly Cycle in the Picture View using Kidspiration Software.

Having completed the Picture View, the children can start to write their paragraphs about the butterfly cycle in the Writing View. We'll provide students with a VCOP Pyramid (you can find information about these pyramids in the post on Resources for the Literacy Classroom). This is  the design for the pyramid we made and some examples of texts which could be written with it:

Our pupils could also write the chunks of the sentences in big pieces of paper or cardboard and display them on the classroom walls. The result would be something similar to this:

Chunking sentences in our classroom. Actually the work made by other partners was much better.

WORD WALLS

Example: The cycle

For this famous story I designed different word walls to work with. The story provides so many topics, so I thought it was worthy. Some word walls we can use in the classroom are the related to:

1. The butterfly cycle (picture in the right)
2. Days of the week
3. Fruit
4. What the caterpillar ate on Saturday
5. Other words: key words

You can see an example in the picture beside. To see some example of how to work each topic, you can download my pdf. file clicking HERE.

To read more about Word Walls you can go to my post on Resources for the Literacy Classroom.

The word wall we used to work in the classroom was the one about what the caterpillar ate on Saturday. We designed and put into practice 7 different activities you can see in my file:

How to work with the words from the word wall (7 activities)

TO DOWNLOAD ALL THESE RESOURCES FOR WORKING WITH 'THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR', CLICK HERE.