The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a children's picture book that is made for readers who are infants to two years old. The book was written and illustrated by Eric Carle in 1994. Carle uses big, bright, and textured illustrations throughout the story to catch the readers attention.

The story starts off with an egg hatching early in the morning and a hungry caterpillar pops out. The caterpillar goes on a search for the next week for food, eating it's way through many different foods, such as apples, pears, oranges, and cake. All the different food the caterpillar began eating gave him a bad stomach ache on Sunday, so he ended up eating a leaf and feels all better afterwards. After a long week of eating lots of food the caterpillar is fat and and no longer hungry. The caterpillar builds himself a cocoon and climbs inside for several weeks, and when he emerges from the cocoon he is a beautiful butterfly.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a great book for children because it is simple and eye catching for young readers. The young readers can also relate to this book because children eat a lot of different food some they like and some they don't. This book is also good for teaching children about numbers, shapes, foods, the caterpillars life cycles, and the days of the week.

Discussion Questions:

• Why do you think the caterpillar was so hungry?
• Why do you think the caterpillar got sick on Sunday?
• Why were there holes in the book?
• How big do you think the cocoon had to be to fit the caterpillar?

Motivational Activity:

•  You can have the students create their own caterpillar out of different art supplies and draw different foods inside the caterpillar showing what he ate. Then have the students write a short story about what the caterpillar ate to go along with it. 

 Carle, E. (1994). The very hungry caterpillar. London: Hamish Hamilton.