The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Like I mentioned earlier in one of my posts Eric Carle is one of my favorite children's book authors. They way he combines nature and color into a story is wonderful. One of his more known books is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. One of the reasons why I like this book so much is because it is very interactive. While a teacher reads this book to students, students can be engaged and participate by counting along, commenting on the size of the caterpillar or naming all the foods he eats on his journey. With holes in the pages to show that the caterpillar has eaten through the food is really so cleaver. On one side you see an apple or whatever the food is with a whole and on the other you actually see the caterpillar leaving the whole. Although there isn't that much detail in the pictures, there is so much color and simple things like having the sun and moon smiling, or the big beautiful butterfly at the end that capture readers. The thing that I found interesting was that there are only 12 pages in this book including the pages that were cut off or smaller with the wholes through them. This would make this a good book to show younger kids because they may not have as good of an attention span as older kids do. So picking shorter books like this one would be a positive thing. 

I could definitely see myself reading this book to a kindergarten or first grade classroom in many different situations. The first obvious situation would be if I were teaching a science lesson on how butterflies developed. I remember when I was in first grade we got to go out and catch caterpillars and watch them develop in our classroom until they turned into butterflies. My teacher read us this book and I remember loving it because of all the colors. Another time you could incorporate this book into a lesson would be if you were teaching the days of the week. Carle does a great job referring to each day in a separate situation. I have always thought of this book as a classic children's book and after reading again when I am older, I still agree with that statement.