Spring has sprung and I’m loving all the bug and flower themes in preschool. This week I read a classic by Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. As we read the book I focused on vocabulary, categories of food, WH questions and temporal concepts (yesterday, today, tomorrow.) It’s great when the kids already know the story because we can talk about other concepts without losing the flow the story!
We made a bunch of different caterpillars this week! The one pictured above has S-blend articulation targets on it. I also created a version that contains multi-syllabic words. Lots of my clients are working on these two articulation goals!
We made this caterpillar with actions on it! We worked on identifying actions, using verb + ing, and answering WH questions. It was also great for past tense -ed!
We started with a full caterpillar and then took pieces off as we answered questions!
We also did this story retelling with all the pieces of the story. There is a circle for each part of the story! Whew! That caterpillar sure was hungry!
In individual or small groups sessions, we retold the story to make a long caterpillar! It gave us a chance to discuss the butterfly lifecycle. Then we took the foods and sorted them into categories (healthy/junk, hot/cold, etc.)
We also used the pieces to retell the story as I read it whole group. We were pretty proud of our giant caterpillar so we worked a little bit on some concepts! We used words like taller, shorter, bigger, smaller, equal, same, different, as tall as, and as long as. All the kiddos got a chance to measure themselves next to it! We decided who was the tallest and who was the shortest. A great opportunity to work on comparatives and superlatives!
The last activity I did with my little guys was a bug pattern activity! The one I have I picked up at Goodwill but I can’t find it online! It is Similar to this one pictured above! I used it to work on concepts like first, last, middle beginning, end, and same/different!
So tell me… what are you doing to work on The Very Hungry Caterpillar?
Please note that Eric Carle has sent cease and desist letters to TpT and bloggers requiring that his work not be used to make materials. While I find this very sad, considering the valuable language inspiration his boooks are, I will always comply with known copyright rules. Feel free to make your own materials based off of this idea.
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