I'm a Caterpillar

During today's Community Read, we read I'm a Caterpillar, by Jean Marzollo. In this story, we learned about the transformations of a caterpillar to a butterfly. Caterpillars eat a lot of food and get bigger and bigger. When they are full, they hang from a stem and wait until they shed their skin. The soft skin that is left is called a pupa. The caterpillar then grows a hard shell to protect the pupa. The shell is called a chrysalis, or a cocoon. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar is changing into a beautiful butterfly! Once the wings dry off and unfold, the butterfly can fly. The butterfly visits lots of flowers and uses its long tongue to drink nectar. Butterflies aren't afraid of birds and birds aren't afraid of butterflies because they both think other one tastes awful! Soon, the butterflies will lay their eggs. The butterfly eggs have very thin shells. Caterpillars crawl out of them. Then, it starts all over again!

This story helped to answer some of the questions on our "What We Want to Learn" chart. We know more about how the caterpillars makes its own chrysalis and also about how much caterpillars eat.

We really enjoyed the rhyming sequence in this story. The illustrations by Judith Moffatt were also very beautiful. They were made out of different cut up pieces of paper. Mrs. Friedrich said we will be doing a project during Bonus Week where we will have to write our own poems and make the illustrations just like in this story.