Book week

This week has been another exciting one.

Namnoon had a birthday and we all enjoyed his delicious cake!

 For book week our story was The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

 Our class enjoyed the beautiful illustrations and simple story of a caterpillar's transformation into a butterfly. We were lucky enough to be able to get hold of two Monarch butterfly larvae to look after and observe. The children were very excited to have some real life caterpillars to take care of! We talked about how gentle and careful we should be so as not to harm them. Most of the class understood that if we looked after them carefully and fed them they would change into butterflies.

 We looked at some pictures of the life cycle of a butterfly and Ploen recognised our exact breed of caterpillars in the book, so now we had an idea of what our butterflies would look like!

 We used carrots to stamp circles in different shades of green for our caterpillars' bodies.

 As part of a sequencing activity the class were asked to find the different fruit that the caterpillar ate each day. Helping to practise their matching and counting skills.

We discovered lots of insects hidden amongst the foliage in our sensory tray. Some of them had nasty stings or bites so we used giant tweezers to find and remove them all!

We made lots of colourful butterflies!  The class had fun experimenting with colour blending using felt tip pens to draw on coffee filter wings and then squirting them with water to see the colours bleed and mix.

 We stamped paint patterns onto coloured tissue paper and used them to make mosaic wings for our giant butterfly, just like Eric Carle! 

                    Making playdough and sequin butterflies

 We know all living things need to eat and our caterpillars were getting pretty hungry so we went on a hunt to find some caterpillar food....

 We found lots and lots of yummy leaves in all shapes and sizes now to sort the fresh green ones from the old brown ones..

 And feed them to the caterpillars!

Some of the leaves were too big to fit in the caterpillar house so we used them to make leaf soup or punched holes into them like little caterpillars...

 And of course we read lots of stories! Thank you to everyone for bringing in your favourite books! There were so many to choose from and more to read this week... 

Here are  links to some other related clips we liked...Caterpillar Shoes

Butterfly update! Both our caterpillars have been in their cocoons for a few days now and one hatched this morning!! We will set it free this afternoon. The class are very excited! :)