The Fat Cat

My brothers and sister and I first came across this book in the mid-seventies, and, as you can see, we read it many times after that.  Some twenty years later, when I first moved to the north-east, I lived next door to the real Fat Cat.  The real Fat Cat was a ginger tom called Lewy.  He was so fat that one day he got stuck in his cat-flap.  He pulled this way and that, and in the end pulled the cat-flap right off the door and lay in our garden wearing it like some kind of plastic belt.

This morning I had the idea of making a variation on the Lift-the-Flap mini-book theme, using The Fat Cat as a starting point.  I started off by making a Fat Cat, then made some flaps to stick on his belly, and drew some pictures to stick under the flaps:

It also gave me an idea for illustrating one of the songs that I do with Year 1 - El Pulpito - where a whale ends up eating a sardine, an octopus, a tuna and a shark.

This idea of "what have I eaten?" could be adapted in many ways.  You could use a crocodile, a dinosaur or a monster as the eater, and different foods, animals, people or household objects as the food .  You could add as much or as little description as you like.  This could even work for secondary students' Healthy Eating topic.  They could make a cardboard cut-out of themselves, add to the belly what they eat in an average day and comment on how healthy or unhealthy it is.