Very Hungry Caterpillar

The new year always finds me revamping our 72 hour kits (emergency "bug-out" kits) and this year was no exception. With a family of six, space is at a premium so I try to focus on including only the necessities in as small of packaging as possible. With children, one of the necessities is toys and entertaining distractions. If just an hour in the car can be miserable for the parent of a bored child-- how about three stressful days? Besides the easy to gather card games and drawing materials like notebooks and colored pencils, this year I am adding flannel board stories for my two year old.

One of our favorite stories is  Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This particular book lends itself well to storytelling without the physical book (which would be a heavy and clunky thing to put in a kit.) My children are also familiar with the story and it can be told in a variety of ways. (I love this story so much, I even created a tissue paper mural in the math room at my kids' charter school.)

Although you can probably buy similar kits online from various WAHMs, using old scraps of felt made this addition to my kit practically free. The felt sticks to any cloth material (including T-shirts and car seats). I used left-over puff paints to add details to the figures and I glued different colors of felt together to provide variety. At first I used Elmer's glue but that didn't work very well. I finally went with the hot glue gun. I also originally opted not to put the holes in the food pieces but after I watched my son play with the the set, I went back and cut out holes in each of the fruits.




The entire set squishes easily into a leftover space or side pocket of our 72 hour kits. (I do store them in a little ZipLoc bag to keep them protected from moisture and to keep the pieces from getting scattered or mixed up with other sets.)

Other stories I am now working on include Old Mac Donald, I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, The Berenstains' B Book, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and The Mitten. Some of these I will put in our kits and some I will put on our home-school shelves. I plan to change them out quarterly when I rotate the food in our emergency kits.