Grouchy Ladybugs

Today we read Eric Carle's The Grouchy Ladybug. I taught the kids all about these tiny beetles and then we got to work on making some. I got my idea from here, but I changed it a bit. We started with these materials:

Rolled up strips of black paper, wiggle eyes on glue dots, wings,

black dots (that I made with a hole punch), and heads that were oval and had a small accordion-folded strip on them.

First, the kids glued the dots to the wings. (Actually, those are the elytra, which protect the ladybug's flight wings, but I'll just refer to them as wings for this post. Whenever I teach the kids about animals, I always try to use correct terms.)

Then they glued the wings onto the rolled up body.

Next, they added some wiggle eyes to the head and glued the accordion strip to the body.

Then I poked two holes in the head and used black pipe cleaners (cut small) for antennae. I slid the pipe cleaner through the hole,

then twisted the ends together and bent the tip over.

Sadly, those pipe cleaners were a little too heavy for most of our heads and they needed some more gluing to stay up. It would have been cute if the heads were able to stay afloat, but this was the best I could do:

To tie this in to the story, I asked the kids what made them grouchy and wrote it on the bottom of a leaf.

Then I stapled the ladybug to the leaf.

Next time I will just use paper antennae so the heads can be bouncy. I don't know why they need to be bouncy, but they sure were cute that way!

Fun Fact: The elytra on a ladybug are always mirror images of each other.

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