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Monday, October 29, 2012

C is for Caterpillar

Mini Piwi is 34.5 months old
Miss K used pom poms and squinkies to dot these pictures. See end of the post for the material links
After a week of Space fun we were back to our letters. This week was supposed to be C for Caterpillar.

However, it is kind of hard to have Caterpillars without butterflies so we used the left over activities from the letter B week. This worked out well since we were planning on seeing visiting the Cockrell butterfly house.
 
 Mini Piwi played memory with her Caterpillar cards a lot! sometimes you were even allowed to take a turn too

I had covered the front and back of the the folder with clear book covering so Mini Piwi could use the awesome Crayola dry erase crayons we finally replaced last week. FYI, do not leave them in your handbag and put said Handbag on the seat of the car in full sunlight -these crayons melt even faster than regular crayons.The tracing activities were a hit as expected as she loves anything that looks like her big sister's handwriting. What did surprise me is that she took an instant dislike to the size sorting butterflies and refused to have anything to do with it. Oh well, never can tell...

On rainy Wednesday we visited the butterfly house, with Mini Piwi insisting on being out guide...

Her favorite was the blue Morpho that we saw on Diego
We even got to see the chrysalis and cocoons in the special hatching room. Mini Piwi shouted a hi to the caterpillars busy at their metamorphoses (not too sure at the plural of this one)

On Friday we finished up the week with a hungry little caterpillar craft from Reading confetti. It is such a cute idea. You make the caterpillar from egg cartons....we used oil pastels to color ours as our paints are 300 miles away.
Reading confetti has a printable of all the food the hungry little caterpillar ate (an apple, two pairs, etc). Mini Piwi cut one out and then delegated the rest Miss K. We then retold the story -I did
n't even need to grab the book cause Miss K know it by heart. Mini Piwi counted out each food.
 This went really well until we came to the part where he goes into a cocoon (spoiler alert). This led us to rummage through the recycling bin to find a suitable cocoon, and then make a 'costume' for a toy caterpillar we have so he could be the butterfly. Miss K decided they could turn it into a puppet show if we also made a scene where the egg is first is laying on the leaf. This is what we ended up with...
Making the first scene
The puppet show ready to go

Putting on the show...'scuse the recycling and sandals
Links to materials we used this week
Butterfly unit from Two teaching mommies
Feed the Hungry Caterpillar craft from reading confetti
Preschool Pack Pretty Bugs from 1+1+1=1
Cockrell Butterfly Center @ Houston Museum of Nature and Science