The Very Hungry Caterpillar Day

This week is "Camp Rick" at our house. We have Reagan's 3rd cousin and oldest friend Alex with us for the week. With 2 6-year olds, a 13-month old, an energetic lab, and the continuation of the Biblical no-end-in-sight rain, I wanted to be prepared for a week indoors.

Today was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" Day based on the children's storybook by Eric Carle. I scoured the Internet for ideas and ended up with too many to fit in one day.

First the kids made their caterpillar hats.

Then they made clothespin caterpillars and colored the butterfly wings. The kids used washable markers to color on a paper towel, which they then got a tad bit wet and scrunched up to blend the colors. When it was dry, we clipped it to the caterpillar body to turn it into a beautiful butterfly.

Reagan and Alex worked on a crossword puzzle while I made lunch. I found a site on the web where you can make your own crossword puzzles for free!

Lunch was everything the very hungry caterpillar ate, all served in a muffin tin.

Next up was the word scramble. Last night, I very carefully wrote out the words to about 1/2 of the story on school-ruled post-it notes, cut them up, and put them on the wall for the kids to put in the right order.

Carter found the post-its first thing this morning and tried to tear them all off the wall.

Fortunately he was foiled and the kids spend an hour putting the words in the correct order. They did a great job working together and sounding out the words.

Later on, the sun came out for a few minutes, so we went outside with big nets to see if we could find any caterpillars or butterfly. All they managed to find were some rocks in the wheelbarrow.

So, we came back inside and the kids shaped pretzel dough into caterpillars, cocoons and butterflies.

The last project was frosting butterfly sugar cookies.

They wrapped the day up watching "A Bug's Life" on the air mattress in the playroom, snug in their cocoons.