Saturday 14 December 2013

0 The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Book:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a story about  the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly.
Eric Carle is a famous American writer and illustrator of many popular children's books. He is most famous for this one. 

The Bubble: 
There is so much we love about the book. From the simplest of it being holes for the little fingers to learn counting to the most complex of seeing beauty in change and its hidden message of "Dream On", this book is all about the things that every child must know. 


The book is a story of how a caterpillar hatches out of its egg and comes out hungry. He eats fruit and vegetables on each day of the week in increasing quantities. The illustrations are lovely and the holes are just right for the little fingers to practise counting. It moves on to a treat page with beautifully illustrated kiddie favourites like cake, lollipop etc on the sixth day where the caterpillar eats a whole lot of junk and ends up with a stomach-ache. This teaches your child the lesson of how too much junk food can turn out to not being good. 

Then comes the most beautiful part of how the prickly caterpillar builds a cocoon around itself and stayed inside it for more than a week, dreaming of being a butterfly. It dreams of things bigger than just crawling and eating. It dreams of flying, it dreams of colorful wings.  It works hard towards his dream by shedding all its skin and one day became a beautiful butterfly. This is a lovely first lesson for your older child to believe and to see the beauty in change. 

 If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies - Author Unknown.

Oh, how true. As you read the book , teach your child to not be afraid of the many changes that await her in life. Teach her to always "Dream big", to dream beyond the obvious; Like the prickly, crawling caterpillar dreaming of colorful wings and flying. It has the hidden message that dreams come true by a lot of hard work like how the caterpillar had to shed all its skin to get those colorful wings and to persevere in pursing this dream.

Bubble Ink's verdict:
This is our first story book review and the book also happens to be the first story book in the Bubbling's book collection. Call it bias or sentiment or our love for dreams or whatever, we strongly say this is a must own in every child's library.  From your child's first counting lessons, days of the week lessons,  healthy eating learning, science lesson of transformation to her moral science lesson to Believe and Dream, the book has it all. It will be a long time before your child outgrows this book.

Go, Grab the book, Learn to Count, Say the Days of the week, coax her into healthy eating and teach her to Dream On.

We bought ours, the board book version at this lovely book store in Chennai - Pappadum. We love buying books at bookshops and this shop is one of our favourites.
We give it 5 bubbles out of 5.

The Bubbling's verdict:
Bubbling loves this book. I have seen her transformation from a baby just observing the colorful illustration, her tiny fingers on those holes on the book, beginning to identify the fruits to now saying almost all items on the junk food page. That is my bubbling, the little egg that she was , then went on to becoming a crawling caterpillar and is soon going to be on her wings to become that beautiful butterfly. Her transformation is her verdict for the book. It is a bubbling fab-four. Fab four only because her lesson of Change and Dream is still waiting to be understood. 
We might come back to this post, a couple of months/years later to give it a Full-Five. For now, Fab-Four it is.

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