twolittleajs: Catterpillars and Butterflies

Thursday, 22 May 2014

Catterpillars and Butterflies

In nursery this week, they have been looking at bugs and reading 'The very hungry caterpillar', so I thought I would do a bit on the theme of caterpillars and butterflies at home, especially as our butterfly garden is getting a step closer to being completed.

I started by letting them loose with some paint, Arthur has been saying for the last couple of days that he wanted to do some painting, but knowing the weather was going to turn miserable again I decided to distract him and save it for today (mean mummy!!) So I put the hungry caterpillar book on the table and gave him some red and green paint. I was very impressed with Arthur's first painting, he actually resisted just mixing all the colours together to create a brown splodge on the paper, and painted something that, in an abstract way, looked like the hungry caterpillar. Whilst they had a go painting, I painted some caterpillars of different sizes using my fingertips, a toy cup and a toilet roll tube, hoping to lead by example and encourage some different techniques and some experimenting (plus joining in is always fun!) Alyssa was very interested and had a go at all of them, but Arthur was happy doing what he was doing.

Once the painting was over a brought out a little butterfly hunt small world play that I had created using some leaves, and some pictures of butterflies from a spotter sheet, as well as a small net to 'catch' them in. They both enjoyed playing with the net, but soon Alyssa was off doing her own thing and Arthur was asking me to read the book. Then we played with blankets, crawling along the floor like a catterpillar, then wrapping ourselves up in "Qooons" before we emerged as beautiful butterflies.

For lunch I decided to continue the theme and created a special lunch art piece with the cheese sandwiches cut out and arranged to look like a caterpillar, and half a tomato for a head!