Primary Colors: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

This week for letter C we have been reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.

I had originally planned on teaching my daughter what the primary colors were and how you can mix them together to create new colors for this week’s art project. I figured paint would be the easiest (and messiest!) way to show her how it is done. However, as we continued reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar each day, I began to get the idea of making the caterpillar with the primary colors and the mixed colors! I also wanted to throw a little bit of ‘fall’ in there by using an apple instead of paint brushes.

This morning we took a trip to The Dollar Tree and grabbed a white poster board and two packages of finger paint. Right next door, we took a trip to Grocery Outlet to grab a bag of gala apples.

When we got home, I explained to her that the colors red, blue, and yellow are called primary colors. I told her that if we mixed them one at a time, we could get purple, green, and orange. I showed her how to do it with the first set and then when I put the two colors together for the rest, I let her mix it up with some skewer sticks that I had on hand. As you can see, she also liked to use her finger to mix it up. Unfortunately, our purple did not turn out too well when we mixed the red and the blue together, no matter how I tweaked it. It looked more brown than anything until we stamped it. It KIND OF looks purple now!

After we had all of our colors ready, it was time to use our apple to print our caterpillar together! My daughter wanted to just smear the apple around everywhere, so I let her do that for a while and then I turned the paper upside down to help her actually stamp it into a caterpillar.

When we were finished, I added some legs and some antenna to the caterpillar to complete our very own hungry caterpillar! I contemplated letting it dry and adding a face, but I was afraid that I would mess up and ruin the way it looks now. Maybe some googly eyes would be fun!