Spider Day

The Orca class had Spider Day recently. Each child was invited to catch a spider to bring to school. Our Question of the Day was, "Do you like spiders?" More children said they like them. We also asked them to share a word to describe a spider. 

We let the spiders out into large tubs, and we watched them with magnifying glasses. We had tongue depressors to help push them back into the tub if they tried to climb out. This was a good learning experience about being gentle.

There were many different kinds of spiders. From house spiders,

to garden spiders. They were large and small, black and striped, fast and slow. We observed them and how they moved, and what body parts they have. Then we read an interesting book and learned even more about spiders.

We turned into spiders. We did this by cutting out eight legs, and making a spider hat with eight eyes. We also made a bug to eat later. Then we worked with a spider partner and spun webs made from toilet paper all over the classroom. This was hard work, getting our webs to attach somewhere, and then being careful not to break other spider's webs as we navigated through the many different webs.

Finally we taped our insects onto our webs. We bit them and injected our venom into them. 

Then we wrapped them in more web. When we thought our insects insides had become liquid, we sucked them up. Yum!

We had more practice eating like spiders. We each had a paper plate "web" and a sugar cube insect. We had a straw fang, and we sucked up some water through our fang, and then spit it onto the sugar insect.

When the insect was dissolved, we sucked up it's sweet goodness. Delicious!

The children continued playing being spiders at snack, sucking their watermelon bugs, and catching goldfish bugs as well.

We even had time to play Little Miss or Mister Muffett. Here she sits, knowing the spiders are coming, getting ready to scream and throw her curds and whey up in the air as she runs away to lots of laughter.