Teacher Resource: The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Using books to aid in research is a wonderful way to teach children to understand something inside and out.

A book is a better source than short, brief, and often strongly biased web resources. It’s also great to encourage kids to not just use online resources for their research as it just isn’t that reliable! An advantage to using books in research are that they are readily available to assessors, peer groups, and others conducting research.

My favorite way to use books in the classroom is to introduce topics or ideas. Having a fun playful story to introduce something to your students can really appeal to them. For example…..

 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is a great way to introduce and teach the life cycle of a butterfly. This book is about a very hungry caterpillar who arises from an egg and spends an entire week indulging on all kinds of foods, including strawberries, a lollipop, and a piece of pie. As he eats through each food, he also eats holes in the book big enough for little fingers to fit through. At the end of the week, he’s a very plump caterpillar with a tummy ache. He eats a leaf to dismiss his indigestion and builds a cocoon where he sleeps for two weeks. At the end of the second week, he appears as a lovely butterfly.

Having this vibrant book is perfect for pre-kindergarten to second grade. You could also introduce and teach counting and numbers as a math concept using this book. I would highly recommend this book because it is a fun, engaging, and colorful book that you can read to your students and teach them about the life cycle, numbers, and counting at the same time. Another great thing about this book is that there are a ton of additional resources to go along with it!

 

Strengths and Weaknesses:

The strengths of this book are that it had different fruits to go along with what he ate each day. It incorporates the days of the week which is important for students to know. This book had great pictures which is good for visual learners. The words are also comfortable enough for a small child to understand. Beginning readers can get through the book with little struggle. Towards the end of the book, it shows different types of foods that the caterpillar ate which forces kids to count what they see.  This book appeals to the hands on type of person because they can poke their finger through the holes. One weakness is that this book has incorrect information about the different foods that a caterpillar actually eats.