Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar

It's a funny story to read about caterpillars children would enjoy it. I did! He ate his favourite foods and then he became fat.

I just wanted to add to the reviews I have read that the book also addresses the issue of healthy eating. After consuming all the unhealthy food he has a stomach ache and my daughter explains to me everytime we read the book that "His stomach aches because he ate food that was bad for him." She also comments on the fruit he ate and adds "He didn't have a belly ache when he ate the fruit because fruit is good for you!"

It's compelling story great for kids, shame there isn't a Very Hungry Caterpillar 2. Amazing...best book ever!

Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a great story for kids. my son absolutely enjoyed it because we had the hard back end he could put his fingers through the holes. My daughter who is 5 and 2 years older than my son loved it too.

Great Childrens book although I feel it is a bit expensive for what it is.

I read this book after a colleague of mine spent an entire lunch detailing the depths of feeling he experienced when reading it. After work I went straight to the Waterstones bookshop in Bluewater. This is a very large bookstore and can be found approximately 112 yards north of Marks&Spencer. I located and purchased a special edition 3D fold out copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the princely sum of £7.99. I felt this was a very good buy for an Eric Carle book, and especially as my good friend had praised it so earlier. I was really looking forward to the subtle references to Marxism and the metaphorical battle fought in the head of the caterpillar, bringing together confused family relationships and the stretches of family ties caused by commuting, in turn caused by rising house prices in London. I was therefore obviously dismayed and unsettled when I opened up the book to find the writing style of a standard I am not familiar with. Unprepared to be defeated by the superior understanding of profound life values of the author, I read the book several times through to further condition myself to the conceptual imagery of the author, alas, to no avail. So I sent a telegram to my longstanding friend Professor Edward Nox-Fenterton. I felt that if anyone could help me read and benefit from this book it would be this guy, because he has been the head English Literature Lecturer(HELL) at the university of Cambridge for the last 16 years.

Anyway, he told me that The very hungry caterpillar was indeed an interesting read and my colleague was correct in his understanding of the references to Marxism and the over development of our capital city.

What he did say also was that in writing said book, the author Eric Carle had deliberately opened up a Pandora's box of literature. Apparently, Carle had just been scammed with some technical details by Penguin publishing and the rest of the publishing industry thought it was his own fault. Anyway, as intelligent and ingenious as Carle was, he was also quite eccentric and short tempered. One thing led to another and he decided payback was needed.

Now, every 3 years every name in the publishing industry turns up to a very posh ball in an exotic location around the world. This event is known as the Tri Annual Publishing Exotic Event or TAPEE as it is known in everyday language. This years event was hosted by Scholastic and it was in New Zealand, specifically Auckland. It was supposed to be just another party but one Eric Carle had different ideas. To put what happened next as the world's press put it, 'crazed, failure driven author runs amok with industrial strength laxative'Basically he put four litres of cow laxative in the punch and, to this day (9 years later), each attendee of the party can still only eat stale bread with a thin layer of spread of any sort.

The resolve of the publishing industry is cast of iron though and the committee of non fiction paper publishers (CNFPP) decided to reformat the party event but continue with it nonetheless. Now, they have dropped the 'exotic' portion of the title, swapped the letters around and now call the event PATE.

To revert back to my review now and the subject of the herewith stated article, I shall tell you what happened next to poor old dejected Eric Carle. In fact I don't think I will because you obviously won't print this because I am not actually reviewing everything but talking rubbish.

ps - I don't really expect you to actually take this seriously obviously but I am just continuing writing because I am bored and it is your job to read it - HAHAHAHAHAHA

pps please please don't ban me from this website.

It is a great book, especially as it describes what the caterpiller eats and the illistrations are excellent. I love the book.

Overall, it is a good book, and I would recommend it to children. The author, Eric Carle was predictably remembering the first time he learned about caterpillars. That's what went through my mind anyway.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a good book.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle has lots of colour and also items to count. My kids love this book. The story progresses to keep them interested. There are some things to count, and it shows them what happens if they eat too much, and finally the caterpillar turns into a butterfly - so it's educational about nature too.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a classic children's story that recounts the transformation of a caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. The story is short, with only 14 pages with words, so my review is already longer than the book. The plot in a nutshell is this: a caterpillar comes out of an egg, looks for food, finds and eats it, gets huge and becomes a butterfly.

The front cover is white, containing the title and a large green caterpillar with a red head. Its back is curved and its feet are on the ground and it appears to be looking straight at the reader. Most of the inside pages are also white with highly coloured drawings. The only exception is the first page of the story which is set at night and is mostly dark blues and greens. All the illustrations are highly coloured and are drawn in a way that suggests texture, so you can almost feel the lumpy earth that the caterpillar is standing on. The same is true of the variety of fruit and other items that the caterpillar eats on his way to adulthood.

Education

The caterpillar eats a different food or foods on each day of the week, so your child can learn the days of the week and the names of the different food items. On the first five days, the caterpillar eats increasing amounts of fruit (one apple, two pears etc) so your child will be able to count as well. The fruit are different colours (something else your child can point out) and each type is presented on an individual page. One novel feature is that there are four short pages in the middle, each of which has a different type of fruit. In other words, the apple has a page about an inch wide, the pears, two inches and so on. This creates an interesting overlapping effect. The fruit pages also have holes to show where the caterpillar has eaten; the picture on the other side shows the caterpillar emerging from the piece of fruit. Children will also learn how a caterpillar changes: starting small, growing larger, building a cocoon and emerging.

The toddler test

I didn't think the opening sentence was particularly inspiring ('In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf') but it's not what I think that counts. My daughter really enjoyed pointing to the moon, the egg and the leaf and finding the caterpillar on each page. She thinks it's hilarious when the caterpillar becomes big and fat and loves it when the caterpillar changes into a brightly coloured butterfly. Part of the fun of the book comes with the variety of other items the caterpillar consumes. Now, I'm not an expert on caterpillars but I somehow doubt that they eat ice-cream or pickles. The sheer quantity of items always makes my daughter laugh out loud. She also enjoys the caterpillar popping out of the egg (and we have great fun making explosive popping sounds). Over the last two years, we've progressed from silent pointing, to pointing and naming, to counting. She still loves this story and requests it regularly (I've even heard her reading it to her dolls).

Final word

This is a simple tale which is great for young children. There's not as much in it for adults as some other children's stories, but my daughter's thorough enjoyment of it still makes it a winner for me.