Spell Out Loud

My 3 year old daughter loves to read The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle. Since this week we were studying the letter S, I thought it would be fun to do activities around this book.

Book Summary: This colorful picture book describes a spider's day. Blown onto a farmyard fence, she starts to spin a web. The other animals ask if she wants to play, but in every case "the spider didn't answer. She was very busy spinning her web. (from Amazon)

The first thing we did was re-enact the story by using a big fake spider web and a plastic spider. (Right now is the perfect time to pick these up at stores). We placed our web out on our playset and went over the animals in the story that asked the spider to play. Then at the end we used black hole punch circles to be the "flies" that the spider catches in the web.

Next we made a Busy Spider craft.

Supplies:
6 wooden craft sticks
white yarn
white glue
red fun foam
green fun foam
2 google eyes
1 black pipe cleaner
glue dots
tape
1 piece of heavy construction paper or tag board

First we used Glue Dots to glue the craft sticks down on the background paper. Then we cut yarn into smaller pieces to create the web.

We dipped the yarn into glue and then placed it on the paper. You could just smear glue all on the inside of the frame and place pieces of string.

We created our own Busy Spider out of craft foam. I did have to use a strip of tape on the back of the spider to hold down the pipe cleaner legs. Then we used Glue Dots to place it on the web.

Next we did a spider sort activity. Click here if you would like to download the spider sorting mat.

First I had her sort between objects that were easy to distinguish what were spiders and not: plastic dog, cow, tooth, flag, spiders etc. Then we moved on to the concept that spiders have 8 legs. We counted the legs on all our plastic spiders. Then I mixed the spiders with some plastic bugs I got at the Target Dollar Spot. We then sorted the spiders from the bugs. This was a little harder for her to do because she had to count instead of just look at the item and see if it was a spider or not.