What They Keep

What They Keep is a new, occasional feature in the magazine that will look at something found in a faculty member’s office and the story behind it.

Critters. They live on her bookshelf. A cricket, a ladybug, a spider, a crab, a firefly, and a caterpillar — a very hungry caterpillar. And Professor Catherine Snow can thank one of her students for the infestation. In the early 1980s, Snow started a longitudinal project with three-year-old children from low-income families that explored the aspects of their language and literacy environments at home and at preschool as they related to later school success. As part of the study, mothers were asked to read Eric Carle’s best seller The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Hundreds of book-reading sessions were analyzed, and Snow loved the book so much that she used it again in subsequent studies. Then one day, Michelle Porche, Ed.M.’90, Ed.D.’99, a collaborator on the original longitudinal study, mentioned to Snow that McDonald’s Happy Meals were giving out finger puppets depicting various characters from Carle’s books, including the famous gluttonous caterpillar. “I must have responded with visible envy because when she graduated, Michelle gave me a full set, secured, evidently, from eBay rather than from having personally consumed multiple Happy Meals,” Snow says. “They now live happily on my bookshelf, accompanying copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, and occasionally they have the good luck to be played with by visiting preschoolers.”

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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