For the month of November, I focused on Eric Carle with all the pre-k classes. We’d read The Very Hungry Caterpillar as part of the book election I held, so I just bounced off from there. We read The Very Busy Spider, The Very Clumsy Click Beetle, and The Very Quiet Cricket. The kids loved the stories, and while reading each story I talked to the kids about what looked familiar in all these stories. The sun was the big thing I used to show the kids how all of Eric Carle’s books are his. It’s the same sun in every book, sometimes smiling. It doesn’t look like the sun in other picture books we’ve read, etc. We also talked about all the stories being about insects and arachnids (or to make it easy for the little ones, “crawlies” or “bugs”). And we talked about all the titles having “very” in them.

Once we’d read the stories, the kids worked on Very Hungry Caterpillar coloring sheets that I hung up all over the front of my circulation desk (which I’ve turned into my student work gallery).

I also had the kids stand in a circle holding hands, and we spun our own spider web using yarn. We talked about how this is just what the Very Busy Spider does, and the kids really liked that. Next week we’re finishing up this month-long unit by watching an animated short of the The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I don’t think this unit would normally take a month, but we had tons of half days and days off this month.