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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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