Eric Carle- Week One

We are starting a two week Author Study on Eric Carle.  This is one of my favorite units for two reasons:  1)tons of cute crafts and 2) it is our last unit :)  Over the course of this unit, we read many wonderful Eric Carle books.  I tell my students that I love Eric Carle because he is both the author and the illustarator of most of his books.  Below, I will hit the daily highlights of our author study.

Monday:
Introduced Eric Carle by reading The Very Quiet Cricket and watching a documentary on how he creates his illustrations.  We learned that he acutally paints collages on tissue paper and cuts them out in the designs for his books.  We also learned that he always puts a sun somewhere in his stories.

Tuesday:
We read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, talked about the life cycle of a butterfly and made beautiful butterflys out of painted tissue paper just like Eric Carle.  (I would suggest starting this project in the morning so that the paper has time to dry and bringing a lot of patience with you!)  The papers my students created were beautiful- I wish I had taken a picture before we cut them up.  They cut the tissue paper in the shape of their butterfly and glued them on.  Many of them layered their papers like Eric Carle does to create a more interesting piece of art.  We also put the life cycle on our butterflies.  A bean for the egg, an elbow shaped noodle for the caterpillar, a shell noodle for the cacoon and the butterfly was the finished product :)

Wednesday:

We readThe Very Lonely Firefly and made text to self connections about a time when we felt lonely.  We also made a cute firefly craft.

Thursday:

 We read The Very Busy Spider.  We made a huge spider and worked on our math facts.  Because spiders have 8 legs, we worked with number sentences to 8.  I had some choose to do addtion number sentences and some chose to do subraction number sentences.  I even had one student who chose to do subraction facts with teen numbers to get to eight- so proud :)

Friday:

We read Pancakes, Pancakes.  We had a pancake themed day :)  We started off by reading the book and having pancakes for special snack- they LOVED them.  Then we played Pancake Meltdown with our Snap Words and recorded them on our pancake stacks (pictures below).  I found these games on a Harcourt Story town link- click here for the pancake snap words and here for the recording sheet.

 Next, we made a pancake craft.  We discussed what would be a rational number of pancakes for each of us to eat.  Then we created our perfect plate of pancakes- complete with butter and syrup.  We finished them off with a label saying "_____ will eat _____ pancakes."