Celebrating Eric Carle's Birthday With A Homemade Very Hungry Caterpillar Toy

We love Eric Carle in our household.

He's like an extra grandpa who makes us really great books

around here! The Amazing Child Blog is hosting a wonderful

blog hop to celebrate this wonderful artist and his 83rd Birthday!

We had to join the party and celebrate our favorite author/illustrator.

Happy Birthday Mr. Carle!! 

We Love You!

We baked you a birthday cake!

(actually this is a photo of "C"s first birthday cake-

I made her a Hungry Caterpillar Cake by cutting up a 

bundt cake and baking the head in a small ramekin dish)

(in case you want to make one too!)

First, we'll start with an oldie but goodie from the archives
to celebrate Eric Carle's birthday tomorrow!

Pom Pom Caterpillars

Both of my girls LOVE

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

by Eric Carle!

To celebrate the 40th anniversary

of this wonderful

(and Beautifully illustrated!)

children's book

we made our own Hungry Caterpillars

to play with!

We made a big mommy caterpillar

and two mini-baby caterpillars.

I threaded a needle with a double thickness of thread

and the girls helped string on pom-pons

to create caterpillar bodies.

(then I doubled the thread back through the bodies

to make them stronger before knotting them off)

We added button eyes to the bigger mama-pillar,

and left the little ones plain.

(I wonder if elastic thread would have been better?)

Then we went on a hunt in the playroom

to collect all of the food from the story.

I set up both of our copies of the book,

a tray of play food,

and our caterpillars for the girls

and they had a great time

acting out the story for several days.

Mini-Saurus still plays with her mini-caterpillar

at bedtime while we read the book.

Check out my post about our
Homemade Texture Paint Brushes
we made to channel our inner-Eric Carle!

We made this....

then, turned some cereal box lids 

into this!

Then we made Paste Paper Cereal Box blank journals 

and books to write and illustrate our own stories!

I am planning to make a tape recording

of myself reading the book aloud

for our "read aloud" book center

in the family room.

How cute would these be

in a classroom reading center?!

(you can take the teacher out of a school,

but you can't take

the classroom ideas out of the teacher!)

Psst...lean in -- I'll tell you my secret...

(I also have hopes and dreams of making

a felt board set...

it may be one of my homemade

Christmas gifts for the girls this year!)

This bulletin board set

from Amazon.com

would be so much easier!

You could laminate it and add a piece of velcro

(or felt) to the back of each piece

for instant (ADORABLE) felt board pieces!

Fondly,

Pink and Green Mama,