The Very Hungry Caterpillar

This is a cute story about a caterpillar who eats his way through all the days of the week. The book is unique because each food has a hole punched through it. Students will enjoy this story and this year is the 40th anniversary of the original book.

Some lesson ideas to complete with your students:

• Story sequencing- provide each student with a piece of yarn, a hole puncher, patterns of different foods from the story. Students will trace, cut and color all of the foods from the story. They will then punch a whole in each food. The food will then be put on the yarn in the order it appears in the story.
• Phonics- used the pattern of foods in the story and make cards with beginning and ending sounds of each food. Have students place beginning sounds on one side of chart paper and ending sounds on the other.
• Math-Initially the caterpillar is very small in the story. As he eats his way through the food he becomes bigger and bigger. Give each student 8 different size caterpillars and have them measure to the nearest inch. Record their answers on a separate piece of paper.
• Math/graphing-Make a list of all the foods that were in the story. Graph the students favorite food. Tally the results.
• Science-Talk about the life cycle of a butterfly.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? Gr.1

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See? is a great picture book full of rhyme and repetition. The book goes through a series of animals that the big brown bear sees looking at him. Carle's large collage illustrations make this a perfect read aloud in any primary classroom.

Lesson Plan Ideas

• Writing-Have students make a class book. Each student will make a page of a book and illustrate an animal "looking at them".
• Language Arts-Have students match rhyming pairs of words in the story.
• Science-Talk about the different animals in the story. Make a list of them. Have students discuss different habitats that each animal lives in.

Eric Carle- Lesson plan- grade 1

The first grade students love Eric Carle books. I start in September and each month I read a different book. In the beginning of the school year I read Roosters off to see the World. This story is about a rooster who goes on a journey to see the world. Along the way he is joined by two cats, three frogs, four turtles and five fish. The animals all travel together for a while but one by one each animal leaves the rooster to go back home. At the end of the story the rooster is all alone and homesick, so he decides to go back home without seeing the world.

Some great activities using this story include:

• Story sequencing- discuss the different characters in the story.
• Math problems- use examples of the animal groups for simple adding and subtracting math story problems.
• Social studies- look at the map of the United States and talk about places where students have visited in the past.
• Language Arts-have students write a sentence if they would like to travel around the world.
• Art-draw a picture of all the different animals in the story.