Home > Book Based Activities > Eric Carle Birthday – Process to craft caterpillar

Eric Carle Birthday – Process to craft caterpillar

This time last year I joined in with my first ever linky – we had made Butterflies inspired by a post on Nurture’s Store wall about Eric Carle’s birthday and I linked up over on Mom to 2 Posh Lil Diva’s Eric Carle Birthday Blog Hop. This year I’m amazed that I am one of the co-hosts for this linky.

Eric Carle Birthday Blog Hop 2012

As The Very Hungry Caterpillar is still one of our favourite books and I wanted to show how process art can become a craft. With an easy Toddler/preschool caterpillar to crawl along and munch on some of it’s favourite foods.

Inspired by this Eric Carle book based activity then check out more Eric Carle books that we recommend for Toddlers and Preschoolers.

What you need to make a caterpillar.

Card Stock
Pencil
Scissors
Crayons
Googley Eyes
Craft Sticks
Sticky Tape

How you make caterpillars

As I wanted this to be as much about process as about producing a caterpillar – I decided that I would draw an outline of a caterpillar onto the card stock (I had 3 toddlers with me so one third of the paper for each caterpillar) and then I left them to decorate it as they saw fit – we had read The Very Hungry Caterpillar before hand – but I didn’t want to limit them to using just the colours of the original.

drawing with crayons
J colouring his caterpillar

T joined in for the first time – and decided to go for black and red drawing lines across her caterpillar (it’s amazing in less than a month she has gone from dot marks to lines across a page – I am loving watching her progression of mark making as J wouldn’t entertain doing crayons until he was well over 18 months before then they were all about eating).

crafting outside for children
We decided as it was a nice day to take the craft outside to enjoy

Once they were coloured in we glued on a googley eye to the caterpillars face and then let it dry. None of them have master scissor cutting yet so I cut out the caterpillars for them loosely following the pencil line I had drawn on. We then all stuck our craft sticks on with Sticky Tape and had fun getting our caterpillars to crawl around the house.

Toddler's first craft project
T’s craft a proud Mummy moment to share

T was very proud of her caterpillar and has been playing with it all day.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar inspired craft

Author
Cerys Parker

Cerys is a marine biologist, environmental educator, teacher, mum, and home educator from the UK. She loves getting creative, whether it is with simple and easy crafts and ideas, activities to make learning fun, or delicious recipes that you and your kids can cook together you'll find them all shared here on Rainy Day Mum.

8 Comments

  1. Pinned to my puppets pinboard and Hungry Caterpillar Party Planning board.

  2. What a wonderful activity. I love that you took it outside to complete, too! That is so sweet that T has been playing with hers all day. It’s so nice when they can take pride in something that they do on their own! 🙂

    1. It’s the first time for her – she’s so much into crafts and playing with her makes than J was at a similar age (in fact he was still eating everything in site at the same age!)

    1. We’re loving creating little puppets at the moment I think they like them because they can play with them afterwards

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