The Play Dough Caterpillar 好玩的毛毛虫
Whether you’ve watched the animation, or you’ve read it as a child, this is a story that is so classic and timeless that it hardly requires a review anymore. It’s the kind of book that almost every school will have on their shelves, and almost every parent and child will know.
What you might not have known was that The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle has been translated into over 60 languges! However, many of these translations are out of print or dangerously close to being out of print. It’s because of this that translations of The Very Hungry Caterpillar are extortionately priced on sites like Amazon.
So, we’ve made it our mission to make it easily available - and at a great price - alongside a handful of Eric Carle’s other books like Draw Me A Star, The Very Busy Spider, and Does A Kangaroo Have A Mother, Too?. We’ve got really great activity ideas for these books… so we’ll be working on making blog posts for those, too! The book in the activity photos is our own… The bilingual text was added by Michal - click the link to see how!
One of the many activities that we’ve done with our play dough (click here to see our recipe!) has been to create little figurines and models to play out the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was really quite simple! My sister, Michal, loves making things like this and, as a child, she enjoyed salt dough craft with Zipporah and my dad (some of which we still have today!). Essentially, this is just one big throwback for her!
The results, I hope you can agree, are pretty impressive! We wish we had pictures of Eliora rolling dough and making colours from it - but alas, we do not.
Our favourite activities are the kind that are super easy to do and super easy to get you and your kids involved. Michal loves it because she only ever needs one main resource (in this case, her play dough) and I love it because it’s easy to tie all our blog posts into one nice play dough overload.
You don’t need to open a child’s mind to the creative world because they’re already swimming in that creativity more proficiently than you could ever manage. What you need to do, even if you feel like you’re struggling to keep up with their wild imagination, is continue to encourage it. It’s through their creativity that they learn about the world around them.
A child’s exploration of the world comes from a flexibility of the mind to bend, mend and absorb different aspects of what they are observing, experiencing and learning. In fact, children are able to learn languages much quicker than adults because that hemisphere of their brain is still making the links between sound, image and meaning! I can’t call myself an expert - but it’s really fascinating stuff!
Anyway, we hope this has inspired you to continue with your language journey! Now, get out there and do a little book-related learning with your kids!
Have you ever tried finding translations of books online? What was your experience - did you manage to find any? Maybe, we didn’t look hard enough. But, in my opinion, if I have to look for books like it’s digging for diamonds, then I say that our kids’ literature still needs a little diversifying! What do you think? Do you like these kinds of activities? What kind of book do you want to see next? Let me know in the comments or on our social media! We’re on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!
See you around!
Activity by Michal Ong, written by Delicia Ong