The Very Hungry Caterpillar!

I thought it'd be a nice short-term project for the twins to rewrite a well-loved book which follows a simple pattern, as part of their work on fiction texts and their structures. My 2 year old was obsessed with The Hungry Caterpillar at the time (along with this animated rendition on YouTube!) so we decided to go with that. 😁

We began by re-reading the book together and identifying the key features, e.g. beginning, middle, ending, setting, characters. Then we came up with a simple plan outline together by looking at each page in turn:

On coloured A4 just because. 😊 Then they needed to fill in the gaps in the plan individually, making sure the foods on Mon-Fri were all either fruits or vegetables, as per the book, and the foods on Saturday a mixture of anything. They did this independently, including practising spelling using phonics knowledge, and then I went through their work and showed the correct spellings (along with plenty of praise for trying!)

I made the booklet simply by folding 3 sheets of plain A4 paper in half and stapling them together in the centre. I also got out a pack of "special" gel pens, which they could only use for this project and not their other everyday work/play, which added a little extra excitement and motivation. 😂

We then completed the book over the next couple of weeks or so, so it didn't feel so daunting or like a chore at all.

For the front cover, they copied the title from the book, wrote their own name as the author at the bottom and drew a picture of the caterpillar in the centre:

For the first page, I cut out a couple of leaf shapes each and another small rectangle of plain paper to act as a flap. You'll notice they needed to rewrite the story in their own words; they weren't allowed to just copy the book! On the first leaf they drew an egg - this was then stuck on the rectangle flap and they drew the sun in the corner. On the second leaf, which went underneath, they drew the caterpillar in place of the egg and the moon in the corner:

We then went on the laptop (part of their ICT studies lol) and used Google Images to search for clipart of the foods in their plans for the days Mon-Fri. I showed them how to copy pictures from the internet and paste them into a Word file. In my own time, I then rearranged, duplicated and printed the pictures for them: these fit onto 2 A4 sheets each.

They coloured their foods in, cut them out, then I helped them use a hole punch to put holes in the centre of each one - just like the food in the original book!

They then glued their pictures down, one page for each day, and spent a couple of days writing the captions for each day:

We repeated this process for the foods on Saturday, first going on the laptop together then colouring, cutting, hole punching, gluing and writing (over a couple of days):

I split the page for Sunday in half:

I drew the outline of a cocoon on the page (at their request - maybe your kids would like to draw their own!) for them to colour in and glue some sequins onto:

Finally, we used a separate piece of plain A4 to do some symmetry art using paint for the butterfly. Again, I drew the outline and they coloured it in. We discussed what symmetrical meant and then they glued sequins on in a symmetrical manner too. When it was dry, I glued this to the back of their booklet to make the last page.

Because we keep all our work in an A4 ringbinder, I then glued their booklet onto a piece of coloured A4 card so it could be holepunched and kept with the rest of their work.