The Very Hungry (Chatty) Caterpillar

The Chatty Caterpillars had a terrific Thursday!  To continue our "In the Garden" theme, we talked all about caterpillars and butterflies today.  Our book of the day was The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  This book tells the story of a little green caterpillar who eats his way through a variety of foods and becomes a big, fat caterpillar.  He builds himself a cocoon (or chrysalis) and emerges as a beautiful butterfly!  The children enjoyed sequencing the caterpillar's life cycle and labeling the different parts of the butterfly.  We also talked about the similarities and differences between caterpillars and people!

This morning we also had a great time playing on the playground with friends from the Busy Bumblebees and Talking Turtles class!

Our exploration of caterpillars and butterflies continued with our science project about what insects like to eat.  Before we went on the playground, we put three different snacks-potato chips, gummy worms, and celery-on trays outside for the insects to eat.  Students were able to guess what they thought insects like to eat best, and we showed them the trays to see if their predictions were right.  It turns out that they really liked the sweet, sugary taste of gummy worms.  Then we pulled out our bean-in-a-bag plants that we made on Monday to see how they changed throughout the week.  Students were surprised to see how quickly the beans sprouted leaves and had grown so big over the course of a few days!

During center time today, students enjoyed playing a matching game with words we had learned about from our garden unit this past week, using building blocks to build a garden, and reading books from the classroom library.

For art time we used our hands to paint butterflies!  The teachers helped each child paint his or her thumbs orange to make a thumbprint body.  Then students decided to paint their hands blue or yellow to create butterfly wings after we talked about how butterflies' wings are the same color on each side.  Many of them thought the paint tickled!  They had so much fun making butterflies using their own hand prints!  Everyone did a great job following directions and we did not get too messy.

The Chatty Caterpillars had a wonderful day learning about caterpillars and butterflies!  We cannot wait to see what is in store next week "on the farm!"