The Grouchy Ladybug

This Eric Carle book is about an arrogant ladybug who challenges another ladybug to a fight over some aphids. Then, he decides his opponent isn't large enough to be worth fighting, so the ladybug travels around the world looking for larger animals to fight. Eventually, he encounters a blue whale, who slaps him with his tail and sends him flying back to where he started. The ladybug decides to be nice and share the aphids with the fellow ladybug.

Throughout the book, the size of the pages starts small and get bigger as the size of the animals increase. Also, the blue whale's tail takes up a page in itself and turning it is meant to represent the slapping motion. The time of day is also shown at the side of each page. Note: Many children will not be prepared to graps the complex concept of time until they are approximately 7-10 years old.


Here is a link if you would like to browse the inside of the book.

The ladybug above was made using black and red felt. First, I cut out a body, then, the wings, then the spots. The wings were secured on using hot glue. Here are two ways you can use the ladybug:

1) Phonemic Awareness: At age fix to six years children can identify different sounds at the beginnings of words (rock, sock), as well as different sounds at the ends of words (stem, step). Give each child a black dot. Say a word that begins or ends with a letter (e.g., the letter “g”). If they hear the /g/ in the beginning of the word, they put their dot on one half of the ladybug. If they hear the /g/ at the end of the word, they put the dot on the other half of the ladybug. When each child has had a turn, they can remove the dots and listen for a sound in another word.

2) Mathematics: Between age two and three years children know that when one candy is taken away from two candies, one candy is left. Similarly, they know that when one candy is added to two candies, there should be three candies altogether. Roll a number cube with your child and have them match the number of spot on ladybug to the number of spots on the cube. This will help them build a foundation for 1:1 correspondance of numbers.

Links

Let's Talk about the Grouchy Ladybug

Website full of resources and ideas to use with this book

Ideas for Using the Grouchy Ladybug in the Classroom