Last Tuesday, Valerie Bruzzi’s Life Skills art class at Cranston High School West welcomed the preschool students, staff and CHSW students from the Cranston Area Career and Technical Center’s (CACTC) Education Pathways program to their classroom for a special visit, which culminated several weeks of collaboration between their programs as well as the Graphic Communications Pathways program at CACTC.

Together, the art students have worked to create a special adaptation of Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” which they represented page-by-page with their own artwork, using the same collage-style technique that Carle himself used in the book.

Additionally, the students created egg carton caterpillar puppets for the preschool students so that each one could have their own. The Graphic Communications program took all of the artwork pages and created individual copies of the adapted version of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” so that each preschool student could have their own copy.

The preschool students also had a starring role in the project, as their collective voices were used in the read-aloud movie version of the book that was created using a voice-over for the reading of the text by CHSW Education Pathways student Zoe Sadwin, whose brother Max Sadwin is a student in the art class, and the preschoolers’ voices for the refrain of “but he was still hungry” which repeats frequently throughout the book.

The movie was created using the photos that Bruzzi took of the step-by-step progress as the art students worked. “We did the work in sections,” she said. “First we used different sheets of newsprint paper and tempera paints to do the backgrounds, just as Eric Carle did, and then the next week we cut out the faces into ovals and we made the form for the body. Then we glued them on and put it all together. Each page has little individual touches from the art students. Sometimes it’s in the expressions on the faces or in something like the sunglasses on the caterpillar’s face.”

As the students from the preschool ventured across the hallway to the art room, their excitement was evident and they waited patiently on the rug to watch the computerized version of the read aloud on the big screen in the classroom. They were even more excited to receive their caterpillar puppets and individual copies of the book.

Additionally, Life Skills teacher Suzanne Meyer, assisted by her students, showed the preschool students a bound “big book” version of the original artwork, which would be remaining in the preschool classroom.

“This is both blended learning and teaching diversity,” said Bruzzi. “We are teaching the preschool students to be comfortable with our Life Skills students. Some are in wheelchairs, some use iPads for communication. This helps them feel more comfortable with them.” According to Bruzzi this is the first time that such a collaboration between the programs has taken place, and although the project had small beginnings, it grew and grew.

“That’s how art is,” she said. “One thing leads to another and another, and then it’s bigger than us. When you do a project like this you have to see it, go for it and then let it grow and grow into something bigger than the original expectation, make it bigger than life.”