The Very Hungry Caterpillar Felt Story

Well, this has been a very long time in the making - about a whole year - which is crazy as it wasn't difficult or particularly time consuming to do.

However, throw in a pregnancy that left me absolutely exhausted, then a delicious new baby girl to go with my now three year old and it might help to explain.
  
She is now 7 months old and while I may be getting a little more sleep I still don't seem to manage any more free time to do much so it's a wonder I got this finished at all!

The all time classic story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is one of my favourites - who doesn't love it?  It's such a short and simple, but genius story with so many learning concepts thrown in.  

The illustrations are also a delight and if you're looking for some art lesson inspiration in the Eric Carle style I can recommend Deep Space Sparkle for some fabulous and colourful ideas.

Yes, as a teacher (and mummy) the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar is certainly irresistible! 

So, to the felt story pieces.  

I started this project with the caterpillar which has the most detail and took the longest time to make out of everything.  

I often cut things freehand from felt but for this I knew I had to draw a paper pattern first as there was so much 'movement' in him.  

The sections had to fit together in a way that made him look like he was actually wiggling along.  I managed this by drawing and cutting sections at lots of different angles and cut them in varying tones of green.  

If you do similar, I would recommend numbering the pieces before cutting them out as it made it much easier to piece them all back together again in the correct order and ensured a variety of tones when cutting the felt. 

He took a while to come together but sewing all the pieces onto one large piece of felt (and then cutting out when complete) definitely made the job much easier and also strengthened the back a bit.

The legs were added once the caterpillar had been cut from the backing felt. 

I took all the cut out bits on holiday last year and it was the perfect thing to do in the evenings (for as long as I could stay awake - remember I was pregnant!).  If I got a bit fed up of sewing green bits of caterpillar, I moved on to cutting out fruit.  



The fruit was easy and was done quite quickly.  I made paper patterns for all these bits too so they were roughly the same size, but I added leaves or stalks on some to make them look more individual. 

The food took a little longer and some of it I kept putting off.  I couldn't seem to get motivated to make the sausage but the lollipop and cheese was fun to do.  

Funny the little mind games you play with yourself!

The butterfly could be doing with a little more detail to bring him up to the same standard as the caterpillar so maybe I will go back and add some.  Have you spotted that he's upside down? It was too late by the time I realised so he's very individual!

a handy bag to store everything

To keep all the pieces together - there are 15 pieces of fruit, 10 pieces of food, the caterpillar and the butterfly so that's a lot to lose - I made a very simple little bag that does the job perfectly.  

all the pieces on a felt board

We've just used an existing felt board (a piece of board that I covered in felt) to play with the pieces and retell the story. 

colour matching

Apart from retelling the story, you can try some maths concepts such as counting the fruit, matching groups of fruit to numerals, sorting for colour, discuss before/after/next, first/second/third (ordinals) and talk about the days of the week.  

counting

There is also the opportunity to talk about healthy/favourite foods and even try simple recipes.  

You can see why us teachers enjoy using this story as a focus!


I've got some other classroom resources that I made and I'm happy to share once I can get my hands on them - they are in my classroom at the moment but I'm still on maternity leave.  They include counting cards and days of the week order cards.