One of my most fond memories of reading while in elementary school was The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. When I was in first grade, we read a number of his books since he was coming to visit our school. Because of this, I began to become very interested in his books.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is about a caterpillar that is born and begins to eat vast amounts of food. I believe this book drew my attention, because this caterpillar was eating all types of food and it was quite funny as a first grader to see this animal eating all of this food.
This story is a great one to incorporate into your classroom as a teacher because it can really integrate a variety of subject areas into this one book. This book incorporates eating, numbers, days of the week, and science. When teaching about healthy eating, you can discuss what the caterpillar ate that was and was not healthy. Also, as a teacher I could have the students make a food guide pyramid and list where all the foods the caterpillar ate came from. We could discuss as a class or in small groups if they were healthy choices and possibly why the caterpillar got a stomach ache.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar incorporates science as well. It speaks of the life cycle of a caterpillar which you could use simultaneously while teaching that in the classroom. You can have your students do an art project that follows the life cycle of the caterpillar.
With younger grades you could practice the days of the week as well as your numbers while reading this story.
A very fun way to incorporate this story into art would be to act out this as a play that the students can perform for other classrooms in their grade level or if they have buddies from another grade. They could each have a role and play all the different foods and such. Even as a teacher a twist could be made to the story, you could have the students research what caterpillars eat and they could act out the story in the same way, but with foods that caterpillars would really eat in the wild.
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I remember when my class read that book in elementary school as well! It is a very fun book to read to children because the pictures are very bright and cheerful, and the story really seems to capture the students' attention. I am really glad that you wrote about that book because I did not recall it until I saw the picture!
ReplyDeleteI love this book. He is one of my favorite children's book authors. He has so many good ones!
ReplyDeleteThis book is great. I would absolutly use this book in the classroom. I forgot all about this book, so thanks for using it!
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