Saturday, May 21, 2011

The Life of a Caterpillar Craft Project








Do you and your kids have a favorite book? We seem to have periods of time when we have different favorites. Right nowe we love "I am a Caterpillar". It's a cute book about the life of a caterpillar, how they grow into a butterfly and how the cycle continues. This book is also great because Tyler who has really mastered his reading this year, can read along too!

Our initial thought was, to try to find live caterpillars so we can bring one home to watch the life cycle. We went peach picking and were hopeful to find one:



While we didn't find any, we did find evidence!


We decided to make a display board of this book. We took our knowledge & creativity and placed it on an Elmer's Tri Fold Board.


Supplies:
Elmer's Tri Fold Board
Elmer's X-TREME Glue Stick
Elmer's Painters Marker (black)
Construction paper
Pipecleaners
Edged scissors



Making the caterpillars ~ Just take 2 pipe cleaners and twist! Cut the desired length you want or fold it in half or thirds.


Making the butterflies:
The kids took crayons and sharpened them, we then melted them between 2 pieces of wax paper with a hot iron. Let them cool for a few minutes then cut butterfly shapes out and peeled the top layer of paper off.



The Chrysalis:
We took a few of the caterpillars we made and placed them in white tissue. We them tied them up with pipe cleaners to make them resemble hanging from a tree.


Embellishments:
We cut the flowers out of construction paper.


Caterpillar Eggs:
These are white "pom poms" stuck on to a construction paper leaf.

After all was cut out and complete, we put everything on with the tri-fold board with an X-TREME glue stick from Elmer's. I wasn't sure how well this product could hold because it was a glue stick but it held everything on really well! I was surprised that even the pipe cleaners stuck on in just a few seconds! Also, it's under $2 and great for little hands.

This was a great bonding project, we will probably add this to our Summer Fun to do list for another book, especially since the Library's summer reading program is coming up ! It's also a pretty frugal craft!



If you want to see more of our story, including our reading of the book please do so here:



This project has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Elmer's #gluenglitter #collectivebias

1 comment:

  1. We were amazed at how well the X-TREME worked too! This is such a cute project, and I love that it goes along with a book - perfect for a summer project :)

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