Very Hungry Caterpillar

Preschool theme this week was a classic! The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We of course first read the book. Then our big craft was the life cycle of the butterfly all done on a paper plate, they either glued the stuff onto plate or onto a clothespin that I then clipped to the plate. I had some plastic-ish leaves and little white puff ball things that they glued on for the first phase, the egg on the leaf. Then medium sized green and red puff balls to make the little caterpillar. Next phase bigger puffs for the big fat caterpillar and we glued those on a clothespin so he could "eat" stuff. For the butterfly I grabbed cone shaped coffee filters and snipped off the edges and let them use water colors to paint it. Then I was going to use a spray bottle to spritz it but of course in true me fashion no water bottle to be found. So I just dribbled a little water over them, worked fine. It just spreads out the water colors and makes it a lil prettier :) Plus they get a kick out of watching the colors spread. They also painted clothespins. Then I stuck the wings in the clothespin and added pipe cleaner antennae.

Then it was snack time. Couldn't resist banana butterflies! They thought it was funny. There may have also been chocolate peanut butter and lots more pretzels involved after I took a picture of it. They were all over the chocolate PB!

 Then we did a sheet or two of line tracing, tried using scissors for a few minutes and lots of dot art. I just made my own dot art sheets in google documents. They aren't perfect but the girls didn't care and could identify each thing so we will call it a success. The goal with the dot art was coordination of getting the dots in the circle and also color matching. The circles were different colors and they were supposed to use the matching dot marker. They sort of got it. They loved doing it just neither really wanted to take the time to get the correct colors. Definitely be doing this activity again though. All in all a fun morning :)