The Very Hungry Caterpillar! KA

One of our favorite books in Kitah Alef is The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We read it often during snack and lunchtime. The book goes through all the stages of a caterpillar. First, it's a tiny egg, then it turns into a caterpillar, then it goes into a chrysalis until it emerges as a butterfly!

We have our very own caterpillars in our classroom that we will observe daily for changes! During meal times, a Morah walks around holding the caterpillars for all the children to see!

"Look,  they are moving!" "A butterfly!" "I want to see it!" "I don't like bugs!" "Caterpillars!" We wrote down what the children said and hung it up on our bulletin board. The children enjoyed coming to the board throughout the day to see pictures of them!

Since we've been learning about the life cycle of caterpillars we decided to do an art project for each stage!

The children had the opportunity to make their own caterpillars! We used special pompoms with holes to thread pipe cleaners through to resemble caterpillars! Threading is a great fine motor skill for the children to practice.

We painted toilet paper rolls to make a chrysalis.

Abe putting his pom pom caterpillar in his toilet paper chrysalis while checking on the progress of our real life caterpillars! 

For our butterfly art, we used pipettes to squeeze watercolors on butterfly-shaped coffee filters.  The children enjoyed choosing different colors and practiced squeezing to draw color into the pipettes. Some children discovered that they could use the pipettes like markers! 

         

When they were dry, we strung our butterfly art across our classroom!

The children can't wait to see our caterpillars spin their chrysalises and emerge as butterflies. Participating in the caterpillars' life cycle is a tangible way for us to engage in a process, to follow a sequence of steps that organize themselves into beginning, middle and end. 

Shababt Shalom and happy almost spring!