Synopsis:
In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) by Eric Carle is the biography of a precocious caterpillar as he eats his way through his life stages from egg to butterfly. His death is beyond the scope of the work. The caterpillar has mysteriously easy access to a great variety of foods.
Lessons:
Through reading the book, you learn the life stages of a caterpillar/butterfly, the days of the week, about the sun and the moon, numbers 1 through 5, different types of foods, that if one overeats on junk food, you will get a stomachache! You learn that even boys can grow up to become beautiful butterflies.
Remarks:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a notable book for a variety of reasons. Foremost is Eric Carle's distinctive collage art style which uses hand-painted paper, cut and arranged to create multi-dimensional, colorful, simple, and friendly characters and scenery. From the squishy caterpillar to the foods he depicts, and the mosaic butterfly on the last page, his talent is on full display in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The language and narrative are concise and poetic.
Additionally, the book features pages of different sizes, with a small slice of a page depicting the one apple he eats through on Monday, with the pages growing larger through the two pears on Tuesday (two's day?), three plums Wednesday, and so on until...
...on Saturday, where the caterpillar eats through an entire folio page of beautifully depicted junk food (watermelon notwithstanding). That night he had a stomachache!
The tempo of the book changes abruptly at this page, whereby the end you are out of breath trying to read through the foods as fast as the caterpillar eats through them. This joke page is not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is amusing to think of the caterpillar eating all that deli meat. The pages literally have holes in them, so you witness the caterpillar eating the book as you read it. The book concludes as the caterpillar achieves his butterfly evolution, fueled by his food binge.
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