Friday, October 14, 2011

Spiders!

This has been a creepy crawly week! On Tuesday, after all our Columbus Day fun we started Spiders. We began the unit by singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider and graphing who likes/doesn't like spiders.

Then we read a non-fiction book about Spiders and made a chart of our new learning about spiders. We added to this chart throughout the week. The students picked out their favorite spider facts and mapped them on a circle map.

On Wednesday we read about spider webs and made our own from paper plates, yarn, and spider rings. Then We did a simple experiment with tape and cooking oil to find out why insects stick to a web, but spiders don't. This is from Mrs. Jumps Simple Science.

We also did some spider themed beginning sounds.

On Thursday we wrote about spiders and made spider handprints to go with our writing.

On Friday we made spider headbands

and then pretended to be spiders in another experiment to find out how spiders "drink" their prey. (also from Jump)

We also read a simple shared reading text and sequenced the story. Then we practiced reading the story on our own with little readers.

We made spider glyphs to show how we feel about spiders:

This week one of the kids Literacy centers was this spider web game that focuses on matching beginning sounds to their correct letter web.

One of their math centers what a spider web counting game. The students picked a web, read the number on it and then put that many spiders on the web. (sorry no picture)

During guided math time we made a spider counting book, using our fingerprints as spiders.

We journaled about spiders this week as well. First we worked on drawing and labeling a spider, then we wrote about what they have. Later in the week we wrote about what Spiders can do. 

We ended our week by making spider web cupcakes. I baked and iced them then added a black swirl and the kids used toothpicks to smooth them out into a web.

Some Books we loved this week:
Nic Bishop Spiders (Sibert Honor Book)
How Do Spiders Make Webs? (Tell Me Why, Tell Me How)
Spin, Spider, Spin! (Bookworms: Go, Critter, Go!: Level C)
Very Busy Spider, The
Aaaarrgghh! Spider!
Spiders
Itsy Bitsy Spider

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