There was a lot of interest in the Orca class about the many spiders we were seeing outside last fall. When your a young child, the best way to learn about something is to explore it with your whole senses.

We asked the children to bring in a spider from home. The parents asked me, "A

real

spider?" I know many of us grow up with fears about different things, and spiders is one of them. Sure, we could learn something about spiders from looking at plastic spiders or model ones, but what would we be missing? Would we observe how they move? How they climb? Where the spider web comes from?

There were several different kinds of spiders, some large, some with long legs, some tiny, and even one who showed up at school dead. We put them into large tubs so we could observe them. We had tongue depressors to gently push them back down in the tub if they tried to climb out. This was a great way to practice being gentle. It also gave us an opportunity to observe what happens when a spider loses it's leg.

The children had been told we would use Teacher Magic to turn them into spiders. They wondered if they would really turn into spiders, but realized they would use their imaginations. We made spider outfits.

We had observed out spiders and read a spider book and so we knew that they have 8 legs, and often 8 eyes, too. We used our scissors to cut out the legs, and we used chalk to make the eyes on our spider headbands. We even had spinnerettes from which our web would come, and palps, those little feeler things many spiders have on their heads to feel their way.

We paired up with a partner and began to spin our webs all over the preschool classroom. We used toilet paper for the webs. It was hard because the toilet paper is fragile, and kept breaking.

With the Teaching Parents help we figured out how to attach the web to different things and stretch it across the room.

It became harder and harder to walk across the room without running into a spider web, just like out on the playground.

We had drawn and cut out insects, which got caught (with a piece of tape) to our webs. We quickly bit the insect, injecting our venom.

Then we wrapped the insect up in web, and then slurped out the insect's now liquid insides.

We also tried another way to eat like spiders. We had a paper plat web, and we caught a sugar cube insect in it. Then we put our venom (water) on the cube and waited until it had dissolved, before slurping it up. Sweet!