Display – The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Celebrating 50 Years
In 2019 The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle will celebrate 50 years in print. To celebrate we decided to turn the Very Hungry Caterpillar day (March 20th) into a gigantic birthday celebration.
For years now, our Junior Reading Room has hosted a giant Hungry Caterpillar poster, created by the students many years ago. It is a much-loved favourite of our Head of Library Services and so it has held pride of place in the Reading Room. So, I decided to design and place the Very Hungry Caterpillar 50 Years display around this old poster.
The giant hanging leaf is a new addition to the reading room, purchased from Ikea, and it fit nicely into the display.
With a lot of help from our awesome student library helpers, we made 3D fruit for the Caterpillar to munch on, thanks to Mr Printables for the awesome templates. All the needed fruit is available in the free downloadable pack, we just had to colour the oranges orange to transform them from lemons. We also used these 3D fruits to create headbands to wear throughout the week (any excuse to dress up). We just hot-glued the fruit to a plastic headband.
Our handy Cricut cutting machine cut lots of coloured dots, which we strung together to add brightness to the area. (These could also be used for a Roald Dahl display, as it kind of looked like Willy Wonka had thrown a party with all the colour). A 3D caterpillar was made with styrofoam balls, green and red paint, a purple straw, goggly eyes and more hot glue.
Hungry Hunt
As well as dressing up throughout the week of celebrations, we also ran a Hungry Hunt. Students had to find the fruit cutouts hidden around the library and write down the secret clue hidden with each piece of fruit. Their answers went into the draw to win this awesome prize pack – thanks to Penguin Australia for previous supplying us with Hungry Caterpillar Posters, which were both included in the prize pack and included in the display.
The Storey Treehouse series by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton is a huge favourite with our young library readers. We have numerous copies of each of the, currently, eight books in the series and they are usually all on loan.
I started by finding our library’s most borrowed titles for the past year, choosing the top 8 from both the junior library and high school collections for our top 16. I printed the covers from these top 16 and created mini voting slips. I cut the lettering for the Reading World Cup title using our library’s Cricut machine, and recycled strips of white cardboard to create the match-ups.
An additional competition was run simultaneously with Reading World Cup voting, allowing students to try and guess which book would be the overall winner. Those who guessed correctly were entered into the draw to win a FIFA World Cup prize pack or a art prize pack (for those less soccer enthusiastic). These prizes were from additional items from magazine subscriptions.
