beyond books ~ eric carle books & crafts

One of the kids' favorite authors is Eric Carle.  And I must admit, he's one of my favorites as well!  I love the bright & beautiful illustrations and the sweet & simple stories.  Here's a handful of books written by or illustrated by Eric Carle from our bookshelves:

I gathered them all together (plus a few not pictured...we can't forget my favorite, the very busy spider), and spent the morning reading them to the children.  And even though we read them quite frequently, they are always excited to read them again.  On this particular day I had put together a few fun crafts for the kids to work on after we read the books.

First we made stained glass butterflies (from The Very Hungry Caterpillar).  I cut out a butterfly shape on a bright piece of card stock and stuck the butterfly shape on to contact paper.  Then I gave the children little pieces of tissue paper to decorate their butterfly.

Then I gave each child a butterfly on contact paper to decorate.  One thing to advise the children is to put one piece of tissue on at a time...the sticky contact paper can be difficult to work with.  The kids really enjoyed making their beautiful butterflies.  And while they worked we talked about the life cycle of a butterfly.  This is a great project for kids that need help with fine motor skills! 

Our kitchen window looked so cool when we hung all of the stained glass butterflies!

Another project for this book I found online, but didn't do with them yet are printable Very Hungry Caterpillar books.  I know my kids are going to love these, so I plan on doing them soon!

Next we moved on to a Brown Bear Brown Bear project.  Years ago when I was student teaching I was given this simple little printable, which had pictures of all the animals in the book for the children to color.  I can't find the exact printable online, but here is a site that has printables of each character in the book.  Here's our Brown Bear book:

The kids had a fun time making their books, and when they were finished they read them to each other, it was very cute.  This is a great project for early/pre-readers!

Here's a few more sites with great resources for Brown Bear projects:  The Virtual Vine and AtoZTeacherStuff.

And our final project was to make collages in the style of Eric Carle.  I gave them a pile of paper, scraps from my card-making and scrapbooking.  I tried to give them a whole bunch of different designs, and then asked them to make collages.  Ella made this super cool sea scene: