The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Developing literacy

 

Fiction Year 2, context:

 

The books which we can choose in this stage of Primary are very enjoyable and offer a wide range of stories which are set in the context of imagined worlds and other cultures.

The very Hungry Caterpillar is one of these books, which are very close of children’s real life providing a constructive learning and developing phonemic aware
ness making use of a little fantasy. We can see how many children have had cocoons in their childhood and confirm how excellent is children involve in their own learning.

Some of the different techniques using to teach through these books are:

- Reflect the demands of children’s phonological knowledge and sight vocabulary.

- Provide models of good literacy language, rhythm and sequence.

- Engage the interest of young readers using accessible and familiar themes.

- Includes word, ideas and pictures which help children to begin to understand character and events, and how authors describe them.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a book which offers to children to learn mainly: the days of the week, different food and the numbers through the wonderful story about the butterfly cycle. Because of that, we can use the book in different subjects like, for example in science or mathematics.

Targets are relevant in terms of:

- Children’s interaction; forcing students to understand the lecture by previous knowledge questions and a share and guided lecture.

- Teaching sequence; the leader of reading is the teacher, students are dependents to the teacher and we have to try to create and follow a sequence of reading, be able to sequence the main parts of the story.

- Topics connected with the story; topics connected with The Very Hungry Caterpillar: myself, animals, spring, we go shopping for food.

Reading and writing targets to read a book for children are very important for teachers to clarify the targets and can prepare a good understanding of the lecture which permits children achieve the pointed goals.