Saturday, October 19, 2013

Searching for Webs

Eric Carle’s The Very Busy Spider is a great story for exploring how
a spider builds its web.  It’s also a great interactive book with the many
animals involved and the sounds they make, encouraging the children
to say the sounds as you read along.

I saw a great idea from Miss Tara and Friends website to extend this story.
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Each child is given a piece of yarn to add to a frame (I used a mesh screen).
I also stuck double sided tape to the frame to help build a web.

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When the web was finished we sang, “The spider caught a flea, 
the spider caught a flea, hi ho the derry-o, the spider caught a flea”,
or moth, or mosquito, or bee, or fly.

Then it was time to head outside to see if we could find any spiders
and their webs.
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It was a foggy day, lots of moisture in the air, which made it easy
to find webs covered with dew drops.

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We used loupes, a high powered magnifying glass, to get a very
close look at the webs.

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       Then made quick sketches of the one we liked.

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    We found some busy spiders and crawling bugs.

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Lastly we made our own spider web.  I brought out a paper frame
and contact paper.  As the families found materials for the web
they pressed it on to the sticky contact paper.  It’s now hanging
in our classroom window.