Teaching Jeremiah, A Journey into the Mind of an Asperger's Child

Apr. 15, 2008

Going "Buggy"!

No, we have not quit learning our alphabet. In fact, we still go over the eight letters on our coconut tree everyday so that we don't forget them, but Jerry took an interest in caterpillars a few weeks ago and so, in step with the reason we home school, we took a break from our "routine" and have been studying caterpillars and butterflies instead.

I think Jerry knows most of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" story by heart now. We've read it so much! We also saw the play, along with two other Eric Carle stories, at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. That was fun. We visited the butterlfy garden at MOSI and Miss Helen is waiting anxiously for a few of her caterpillar eggs to hatch so that she can give us a few to watch change into butterflies. We have a butterfly habitat and had fun with it a few years ago, but Jerry doesn't remember that time.

So what have we been up to? Whew, where to start! Jerry made a caterpillar out of a clothespin and some colored pom-poms and then wings from paper towels so that we could turn our caterpillar into a butterfly whenever we wanted to by attaching the clothespin to the wings. Jerry used an eye dropper (great for fine motor skills) to color the wings with food coloring in water. He was amazed when I put some blue food coloring into the red water to make purple!

We ate life cycle spaghetti for dinner one night. I mixed shell (cocoon) pasta with corkscrew (caterpillar) pasta and bowtie (butterfly) pasta. For a snack we threaded Fruit Loops onto a pretzel stick, added a marshmallow head, and broken pretzel pieces for the antennae. Sounds strange, but anyone who knows me knows my theory. Anything with marshmallows is yummy!

We made a Very Hungry Student story. I filled in the blanks while Jeremiah told me his favorite things to eat. He got a little goofy in the middle, but laughs hysterically every time he hears me read the story to him. Here's what he came up with...

On Sunday Jerry ate one can of beanie weanies. But he was still hungry. On Monday Jerry ate two pears. But he was still hungry. On Tuesday Jerry ate three apples. But he was still hungry. On Wednesday Jerry ate four sausages. But he was still hungry. On Thursday Jerry ate five butterflies. But he was still hungry. On Friday Jerry ate one caterpillar, one sun, one snowman, one leaf, one cloud, one stick, one cheese stick, one can of Spaghetti O's, one mushroom, one tomato, and one potato. That night he had a stomachache! On Saturday Jerry ate one chocolate Pop Tart. After that, he felt much better. Whew! Jerry sure was hungry.

We also made a coffee filter butterfly. Jerry colored spots with markers on the coffee filters and then sprayed them with a water bottle so that the colors would spread out and run together. We added a pipe cleaner body.

I sectioned a paper plate into fourths and Jerry made a butterfly life cycle. He used a navy bean on a silk leaf for the egg, pom-poms for the caterpillar, a shall pasta noodle for the cocoon, and a butterfly sticker for the butterfly. He also traced the words of each part of the butterfly's life cycle.

Jerry also used my potato peeler to shave some crayons so we could make a wax paper butterfly by ironing the crayon shavings in between the wax paper.

Then Jerry used Q-tips to put paint blobs on one side of a butterfly cutout. He folded the butterfly in half and it turned out very pretty the way the paint blobs spread from one side to the other.

We re-created "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" story on a homemade felt board. I used a pizza box from Pizza Hut for the felt board. I decorated the outside and then covered the inside with felt. Then I laminated the pieces from the story and put felt on the backs of them so Jerry could re-tell the story with the pieces or follow along on the felt board as I read the book.

Outside

Inside

Jerry used his fingerprints and inkpads to make his own butterflies and caterpillars. He glued sticks on the paper for a tree and cotton balls for clouds. This was a great sensory activity. I also let him add his own things to the picture. So he added a sun and a snowman!

For math, I laminated leaf pictures onto index cards and then numbered the cards from one to ten. I gave Jerry navy beans (eggs) and he put the number of "eggs" on each leaf that the card said to. He's not real good at counting yet and so I held up my fingers to represent the number on the card. Then, as he put each egg on, I put down one finger so he could see how many eggs he had left to put on.

I printed out about twenty colorful butterflies as well and laminated them to index cards. Then I cut the index cards (and butterflies) in half and Jerry had fun matching each butterfly half to its partner.

Then Jerry put laminated story cards from "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" in order to practice his sequencing.

We also practiced beginning letter sounds by gluing pictures of things that began with either a "c" (caterpillar) or a "b" (butterfly) onto their appropriate page.

I found a cool craft in an Usborne book that uses yarn, a picture of an animal, a penny, two beads, and a straw to make the critter appear to "crawl" up a wall. This was fun!

Crawling Caterpillar

We made a caterpillar from different shapes of construction paper. Circles were his head and body, rectangles were his antennae, squares were his eyes, and triangles were his feet. We actually did this project at Abrakadoodle with our other home school friends.

And of course, every creature can be made out of a toilet paper tube!

Last but not least was Jerry's favorite by far. We made a puppet version to go with our Eric Carle story. I glued google eyes and some spots to a green sock and slid it on Jerry's arm for the caterpillar. I had laminated all of the food from the story and cut holes in the middle of them beforehand. Then, as we read the story, Jerry could pretend his caterpillar was eating each piece of food by sliding his caterpillar arm through the hole on each piece of food. At the end of the story, we put a brown paper lunch bag over the caterpillar's head to represent him in a cocoon. Then, when we pulled the bag off, I used Velcro to attach decorated felt butterfly wings to the top of Jerry's caterpillar arm. He would run around the house flapping his arm to make the butterfly fly. It was so cute!

Caterpillar

Butterfly

It was amazing how many skills we seemed to cover just with learning about caterpillars and butterflies. We had so much fun in fact that next is Eric Carle's "The Grouchy Ladybug". I promise not to make you wait three weeks this time to find out what we're doing. I'll try to update everyone weekly this time. Until next time, don't let the bed bugs bite!!