One of my fave children’s books has to be ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar.’ I recently picked up a big book copy of the story for Minnie & she loves sitting in the middle of it surrounding herself with the illustrations. The children’s section of our local library has a great selection of big picture books which we often borrow to read (& play in!)
I’m encouraging Minnie to explore shapes at the moment & the Hungry Caterpillar offered us lots of opportunities to discover them. Minnie is keen to recognise circles & with our fave book in mind we made a circular caterpillar collage.
We used:
Scraps of green, yellow & red thin card
A hole punch, glue, scissors, pen
Green paint dabber
A selection of circular objects to draw around
Pipe cleaner
Large sheet of green paper
On the scraps of green paper we drew around a mug & dish to create some circles for the caterpillars body & a red one for the face, before cutting them out.
We then drew around the small lids to create the yellow & green circles we used for the eyes
With the paper that was left Minnie used the hole punch to create small circles for the pattern on the caterpillars body.
Using the green paint dabber, glue, & hole punched circles she decorated the green circles & left to dry.
Minnie stuck the yellow & green circles together to make the eyes & stuck them to the caterpillars face.
Once all our circles were dry we glued one side of each one & overlapped them to form the caterpillars body. We then added the chenille wire behind the head for the antennae.
And because he’s a hungry caterpillar we added a leaf for him to munch as well. I cut out a simple leaf shape & Minnie added the holes using the hole punch, which she loved!
I think we'll create some of the food from the book now as well using other shapes, e.g. a triangle for the watermelon, a crescent for the pickle, & square for the cheese... but that’s for another day.