The very hungry baby (The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle)

Member Name: Bryn Pearson

Product:	The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle
Date:	17/03/03 (82 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: its a classic

Disadvantages: not entirely accurate

The very hungry baby, having munched his way through a banana, decided he wanted to get his nearly visible tooth into something a bit more intellectual. So out came the board books.

'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' is one of the oldest 'touchy feely' type books - these days you can get a lot of very tactile board books for infants, with all manner of things to poke, squeeze and generally explore. If 'The very hungry caterpillar' isn't the first, it must be close.

The tale itself is a simple one, beginning with a small white egg on a leaf, it shows us a week in the life of a caterpillar, and its ravening appetite. To be honest, the creature depicted herein is not that much like the ones you might find on your cabbages - it eats widely, while caterpillars tend to prefer one or two plants, it eats junk food, and it doesn't spend very long growing up. But this sort of thing doesn't really matter to a small child whose grip on language is tenuous and whose notion of the finer details of biology is non existent.

You can start small children very young with books. My lad is nearly seven months old now, and hooked on board books already. Obviously, he can't read them, but he seems to like me reading to him. He reaches out to touch the books, exploring with little fingers. Colours and shapes on a page fascinate him, and I doubt he's alone.

So, we read about the caterpillar and his week of furious feeding followed by his amazing transformation. Its a nice story, there's days of the week, counting, and neat little holes in the page for tiny fingers to explore. The illustrations are vivid and simple enough that even a very small squeaky person can enjoy them, but they aren't so simple that you will lose interest yourself. One thing to note, the paper form is going to be too delicate for very young readers and eaters who are as likely to chew as anything else. The board version is also a bit hea
vy for very small hands so you'll have to read it with them (oh, the hardship!)

This is a charming little book for young readers. My copy came from Mothercare and cost just shy of five pounds. Sadly I missed the offer where you could get a free cuddly caterpillar to go with it. Its a gem of a book, it doesn't date, it stands many, many readings. I loved it as a child and now I'm enjoying it as a parent.

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