Eric Carle...'Animals Animals'

Eric Carle...the one name that every teacher...loves/fears (delete as appropriate) hearing!

As I see it there are two ways of thinking about Eric Carle...the first is the joy of teaching the very hungry caterpillar again and getting your kids to fall in love with such an iconic book (lets face it, it is probably the first book most people would name when hearing the name). The flip side of this is the dread of teaching the very hungry caterpillar again and having to try to get your kids to fall in love with a book you have taught time and time again!!!

Well...I rebelled when I was faced with the topic 'Books and Authors'. Instead I went for a lesser known collection that wasn't actually written by Eric Carle but instead it is a collection of poetry from different authors and the artwork is done by Eric Carle (kind of the best of both worlds - I don't have to teach the very hungry caterpillar for the Millionth time but I still get to enjoy the fantastic artwork!)

Animals Animals - Eric Carle

It was such a fantastic topic and the kids loved every Monday morning as we introduced a new animal each week - we started with the poem in English, we learnt about where they lives and what they ate etc in wider world and we did some animal themed music based on that animal each week in Music! It was great! We also fed in some ICT collages and research about the animal and also some artwork in our art lessons!

Here are some links to some resources I uploaded to TES:
Eric Carle Collage Making Instruction Sheet -  http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Eric-Carle-Collage-Making-Instruction-Sheet-6344218/

Animals Animals PowerPoint Poetry, Sensory Poetry, Symbol magazine and Vocab cards - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Eric-Carle-Animals-Animals-Poetry-Collection-6357636/

Animals Animals Songbook and Planning - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Eric-Carle-and-39-Animals-Animals-and-39-Songbook-and-Planning-6370284/

So please be inspired to do something different! Don't just think you have to recycle the hungry caterpillar year after year - although it is a pretty awesome book!

Enjoy teaching this fantastic text!