Storytime - Ahhhhh! Spiders!

Toddler

Books 

The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle and The Itsy Bitsy Spider by Lorianne Siomades.

Songs / Rhymes: “Good Morning”, “Hello, How Are You?”, “Open, Shut Them”, “There’s a Spider on the Floor” with spider puppet, “One Elephant Went Out to Play” on the felt board, “I Wiggle My Fingers”, “The Great Big Spider”, and “The More We Get Together”.

Craft: Hand Print Spiders. Materials: black construction paper hand prints, purple paper, googly eyes, crayons, glue, and tape. The toddlers glued the thumbs of their hand prints together to make a spider. They glued eyes onto their spiders and then colored them in.

Preschool

Books: The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle and I Love Bugs by Emma Dodd. The preschoolers helped me read Carle’s book by supplying the sounds of the animals.

Songs / Rhymes: “Welcome to the Library”, “Hello, How Are You?”, “The Great Big Spider”, “Open, Shut Them”, “There’s a Spider on the Floor” with spider puppet, “I Wiggle My Fingers”, and “The More We Get Together”.

Special Activity: The preschoolers shared with me what they knew about spiders. They knew that spiders make webs, have eight legs, and eat flies and other bugs. They even knew that spiders trap flies in their sticky webs!

Craft: Spider Webs. Materials: black construction paper, construction paper crayons, glue, and glitter. The preschoolers drew their webs onto the construction paper using the crayons, then went over the lines with glue. I added white glitter to their papers when they were finished.

Songs/Rhymes

There’s a Spider on the Floor (with spider puppet)

--Raffi

One Elephant Went Out to Play

One Elephant went out to play

Upon a spider’s web one day

He had such enormous fun

He called another elephant to come.

(HEY, ELEPHANT!)

Two elephants went out to play

Upon a spider’s web one day

They had such enormous fun,

They called another elephant to come…

--Miss Mary Liberry

The Great Big Spider

--from Lapsit Services for the Very Young II by Linda L. Ernst. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc, 2001.

*I do this version instead of itsy bitsy because, as Ernst suggests in her book, it's easier for the smaller children to do gross motor movements than the fine motor skills involved in the finger play.