For our featured activity of our week of caterpillars, your little one participated in a simple science activity that combined five our our favorite items….baking soda, vinegar, playdough, food coloring, and googly eyes! Before we got started with our science activity, we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.

Each student was given a card that had a picture of an item from the story. During the reading of the story, each child was selected to place their “card” onto a large leaf made of felt. Once we read the book, we talked about what caterpillars looked like and made our own using some playdough.

We love finding ways to connect books we read with simple science activities, so we decided to make our playdough caterpillars fizz! We used a lot of different materials, including a large plastic tray, playdough, vinegar, baking soda, food coloring, an eye dropper, googly eyes, and scissors.

First we made caterpillars with playdough and added pipe cleaner antennae and googly eyes. While we made our caterpillar we counted each ball and talked about the simple color patterns we were creating with them.  Next, your budding entomologist made a good sized thumbprint in each caterpillar segment. While we made our thumbprints we counted our playdough balls again. Then, we filled the thumbprint sized hole with baking soda and added one drop of food coloring to each hole. Then, the students were asked about what was going to happen.

Each child vocalized  some predictions. Some predicted which side of the playdough balls the liquid was going to run off of as it exploded. They also predicted which colors they thought they would see as the eruptions happened.

Once they made their predictions, each child filled up an eye dropper and dropped some vinegar on top of each caterpillar segment.

The colored fizzing explosions were a hit with your little ones. They were content to do this activity again and again and again.