We have been thinking a lot about caterpillars and butterflies at our house. We have been watching caterpillars turn into chrysalis and are waiting for them to emerge as butterflies.
While waiting I decided to do a Readers’ Theater with the girls using the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.
First I downloaded masks from Masketeers.com. Ian Nicholls from Masketeers.com let me try out his downloadable masks. There are tons of animal masks to choose from and can be used in so many different ways.
The masks come in two versions: already colored and black and white coloring book style. I printed out the caterpillar and the butterfly in the coloring book style.
The girls colored them and cut them out. Instead of making them into masks, we glued popsicle sticks to the back of each one and made puppets.
The girls loved the butterflies on the sticks because they could make them fly and flap their wings.
Then while I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the girls acted out the story.
We used colored buttons to represent all the fruit and food the caterpillar eats during the week. We put the buttons in a graph. At the end I had the girls count how much fruit and food the caterpillar had eaten through.
When we were done with the story the girls had fun running around the yard making their butterflies fly and land on flowers.