Day 2 of preschool break brought brightly colored caterpillars!  It also brought some overcast skies so I think my super cool scavenger hunt (I use super cool pretty loosely, you know, super cool in 3 1/2 year old terms) will be postponed until we have better weather.

Moving on, today Little Man learned that caterpillars turn into butterflies!  We talked about bugs as Little Man painted his caterpillars (one with a foam brush and the other with a bristle brush) and while the caterpillars were drying, we made insects out of pipe cleaners! A very rudimentary butterfly, bee and beetle and he loved them all.  When the caterpillars were dry, we poked holes for pipe cleaner antennae and glues googly eyes on their faces.  It was a huge success and Little Man thinks his caterpillars are super cool and they have a home in his bedroom with his paper spider from yesterday.

Supplies needed for an egg carton caterpillar: egg carton, paints and paintbrushes, pipe cleaner, glue, googly eyes and a marker (for it’s mouth).  Cut the top off your egg carton and then cut the bottom of the egg carton in half so you have a 6 segment caterpillar.  Paint, let dry, poke antennae holes, glue on eyeballs, draw a mouth and you are done!  Recommended reading: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle but alas, out of the many, MANY Eric Carle books we have, we do not have that one but Little Man’s preschool classroom did so he is a little familiar with it.  If you don’t have a related book, do what we did and make pipe cleaner bugs and talk about what each bug does (bees make honey, they fly around to flowers and then have stingers….).

Happy bug making! Until tomorrow….

Edited to add – Overcast skies turned into huge rain showers so we grabbed our umbrellas and headed out to play in the driveway.