The Very Hungry Caterpillar Week

Our third theme week for the summer was based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle.  Our week was full of fruit, picnics and lots of painting, which meant my girls were very, very happy. Picnics and painting are two very favorite things right now.

One of our activities throughout the week was eating along with the book.  Each day with dinner we had the fruit that the caterpillar ate that day.  So on Monday we ate apples.  On Tuesday we ate pears. We skipped his Saturday feast, but probably managed to get a few of those treats in over the weekend.

Besides The Very Hungry Caterpillar, we also read

The Crunching Munching Caterpillar, by Sheridan Cain and Jack Tickle

Waiting for Wings, by Lois Ehlert 

Planting a Rainbow, by Lois Ehlert (this probably would have been a better fit for our garden week, but I happened to see it at the library, and figured it fit well enough)

To start the week, we made caterpillars by painting egg cartons.  After they were dry we added pipe cleaners and googly eyes.  

It was hard to keep Miss A's hands off the finished caterpillars for a picture.  She was very excited about them!

We also painted caterpillars like the one in The Very Hungry Caterpillar using marshmallows (inspiration here). The best part... the girls got to sample a marshmallow when we were done.  They were in heaven.

Miss A's version of painting with marshmallows.

Little J's version of painting with marshmallows.

I also pinned these Very Hungry Caterpillar coloring pages a while back, which came in very handy.

At the end of the week, our caterpillars turned to butterflies.  Miss A and I have done this activity before, but she still had a lot of fun.  I cut butterflies out of construction paper, and we painted half of each butterfly (I folded the butterflies in half so they would only paint one side).  Then we pushed the two sides together, and pulled them apart so our butterflies would be symmetrical.  When they were dry we added little faces and pipe cleaner antennas.