Make a simple woolly bear caterpillar craft to celebrate the coming of the fall season! This caterpillar craft is a fun fall craft idea that can be used in occupational therapy activities to help kids with scissor skills, bilateral coordination, visual motor skills, direction following, fine motor skills, and more.
Fall Craft Idea: Woolly Bear Caterpillar Craft
Where I live we have a local Woolly Worm Festival that is celebrated the third week in October every year with the 41st annual taking place this year. The festival hosts a fun race for woolly worms as they climb a three-foot length of string during different heats to win first place. The winning woolly worm gets the honor of predicting the severity of the coming winter based on its coloring. (The darker the shading the more snow and cold it represents.)
A woolly bear caterpillar has 13 body segments and there are 13 weeks of winter so each segment represents each week of winter. Now this isn’t truly science, but simple local folklore fun for kids and adults.
Woolly Bear Caterpillar Craft for Occupational Therapy Goals:
Since woolly bear caterpillars can be seen everywhere here as the fall season gets underway, we made a fun paper craft using simple materials to work on fine and visual motor skills. From cutting to pasting, construction to handwriting, this paper craft makes a big impact both in process and in end product.
It’s a fun fall fine motor activity that kids will love!
Materials Needed to Make a Woolly Bear Caterpillar Craft
Amazon Affiliate links are included below.
Here are the materials needed to make this cute woolly bear paper craft:
• Black construction paper
• Brown construction paper
• Sheet of white cardstock paper
• Two googly eyes
• Your preference of bottle or stick glue
• Scissors (This brand is my favorite for kids)
• Brown marker
• Optional: fall leaf stickers or leaves to cut out
Steps to Make a Woolly Bear Caterpillar Craft
Preparation steps:
1. Mark the black and brown construction paper with lines for a child to cut in order to create 1 ½” wide and 4 ½” long strips. Draw cutting guidelines with regard to width based on each child’s skill level. You choose how many of each color.
2. If needed, write Woolly Bear Caterpillar on the cardstock paper for child trace or have child fill in the word or letter blanks or have child copy the text. You choose which level of written output matches each child’s skill level.
Child steps:
1. Have child cut on the black and brown paper lines to create the individual strips.
2. Have child wrap strips into loops and glue the ends. Press and hold for a few seconds to ensure they remain adhered together.
3. Have child glue the loops onto the background cardstock paper to create a chain that resembles a caterpillar body. Have child press and hold each loop to the background paper for a few seconds to ensure it will remain attached to the paper.
4. Once the caterpillar body chain is created, have the child glue googly eyes near the top of the last loop at one end.
5. Optional: Peel sticker backs off of leaves and apply stickers to the background paper or cut and glue leaves on the background paper.
6. Finalize the activity by labeling the craft creation with “Woolly Bear Caterpillar” text either by tracing, filling in the blank, or writing independently.
Woolly Bear Caterpillar Handwriting Activity
For further handwriting practice for older children, you could have them write a fact sheet about woolly bear caterpillars or use the acrostic poem printable I have created and included below.
Click here to print this free Woolly Bear Caterpillar Acrostic Poem and work on handwriting.
The Woolly Bear Caterpillar craft can be taken home or used in the creation of a classroom or therapy room bulletin board to celebrate the coming of the fall season.
Hope you enjoy this fun paper craft project with kids while working on fine and visual motor skills!
