Hungry

Caterpillars

Introduction

·      Imagine that you are a very hungry caterpillar. Can you eat anything that you want or are you searching for special food? Can you eat ice cream, cupcakes, like our very hungry caterpillar or do you need to find fruit, and vegetables, do caterpillars eat meat? Will you go looking for a chicken? Will you want to find some rice or bread? What kind of caterpillar are you?

·      What would you look like?

·      What are you going to eat?

Task

·      You will make a poster with a picture of what you would like as a caterpillar and put the food that you would eat. (The pictures that you draw or use much be large enough to see at the back of the room.)

·      Then you will present you poster to the class and hang it in the room

Process

Step 1:

Look at the caterpillars and click on the picture to learn what they eat.

Step Two:

Draw a picture of your caterpillar and write down what it eats, trees, bark, fruit, leaves, etc.

Feeding

With rare exception caterpillars are herbivorous, THEY DON’T EAT MEAT, that is, they feed on plants. Most typically caterpillars feed on green stuff but also on roots, within branches and woody stems, in seeds, and on flowers. Few species of caterpillars are predaceous, feeding on animals.

Within a given environment caterpillars can be found in a variety of habitats. Caterpillars can be found in fruits, roots and stems as borers or miners; in leaves as miners; on the surface of leaves or in the nests of other insects, such as ants and bees.

Step Three:

If you have drawn you caterpillar, and listed the food it eats, you may go to this web site and see other cool caterpillars.

http://www.tulane.edu/~ldyer/lsacat/index.htm

Step Four:

Now draw a big picture of your caterpillar and wither search for picture in magazines or draw the food that your caterpillar eats and this will fill the poster. There fore the caterpillar and food will be big enough for the back of the room to see.

Resources

The Very Hungary Caterpillar by Eric Carle

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/2000/catnw/pht103.htm

http://www.tulane.edu/~ldyer/lsacat/index.htm

http://www.ext.vt.edu/departments/entomology/ornamentals/caterpillars.html

Evaluation

Poster: Caterpillar, drawn and colored 1-4

Food that the caterpillar eats, cut out, pasted, colored, drawn,

etc. 1-4

Size of caterpillar and food (large) 1-4

Presentation of poster 1-4

Conclusion

Caterpillars do not eat any food that they can find like the very hungry caterpillar, this was a pretend story. Real caterpillars not only eat very different food but they also look very different than the typical green long flat skinny caterpillar in the stories.