Caterpillar Crafts and Activities

Here are some adorable caterpillar crafts and activities that preschoolers and kindergartners will love!

Spring is the perfect time to learn about caterpillars. Add a book or two about butterfly metamorphosis, and you’ve got a science lesson!

Pom Pom Caterpillars:

These are so simple to make and so adorable. Kids will love playing with these when they are finished making them!

Supplies Needed:

• Craft sticks or popsicle sticks
• Pom poms
• Googly eyes
• Hot glue gun
• Pipe cleaners – optional, for making antennae

To make the caterpillars, simply clue pom poms onto a craft stick! Then add googly eyes.

We used a low temp glue gun. If you want preschoolers to do this craft themselves, I would suggest using Tacky Glue. They can use Q-tips to apply the glue.

We made some caterpillars with craft sticks and larger pom poms, and some with popsicle sticks and smaller pom poms. I can’t decide which ones I like best!

We also tried adding some caterpillar pipe cleaner antennae, but I’m not sure if I like them.

Caterpillar Pretend Play

After you make your pom pom caterpillars, it’s fun to create a habitat for them. Kids may want to use a cardboard box to make a home for their “pet” caterpillars!

I decided to cut out some paper leaves for ours.

Kids will have so much fun making their caterpillars crawl around on the leaves and pretend to eat them. Use scissors to give a couple of the leaves some bites out of them if you want.

Caterpillar Math Activities

Smallest to Largest:

Add some learning to this activity by lining up the paper leaves from smallest to largest. (To do this, you’ll have to be intentional about making each one a slightly different size when you cut them out. I used a ruler.)

Counting Leaves:

Another fun idea is to make some counting leaves! This provides two benefits – counting, and using a hole punch. Such a great way to strengthen little hands.

This also has a fun pretend play element. Kids can pretend that the caterpillars are eating holes in the leaves!

Setup for this is SO easy. Cut out several paper leaves and label them with the number of holes that students should punch.

Caterpillar Patterns:

When making your caterpillars, encourage students to make patterns with the colors they use.

This can be done with the pom pom caterpillars (above) as well as egg carton caterpillars or LEGO caterpillars (below).

Egg Carton Caterpillars

Save some egg cartons and make this adorable caterpillar craft! We had so much fun with this.

It’s a VERY simple craft, but you can see the full instructions over here: Egg Carton Caterpillars, Frogs, and Turtles. (Also, the turtles are SUPER cute so you’ll want to check those out too.)

Painted Rock Caterpillars

Like the pom pom caterpillars, these are so fun to play with! Kids can arrange the painted stones in different ways.

Build LEGO Caterpillars

It’s so fun to build LEGO caterpillars! We have one caterpillar in our LEGO Spring Animals post, and then we also have instructions for building the entire Monarch Butterfly Life Cycle with LEGO Bricks.

Need more spring ideas? Head over to print our Spring Coloring Pages!

There are 8 different designs to print, including a caterpillar, butterfly, ducklings, and more.