Spider Celebration!

Well, despite the fact that this week was only a 4-day week, boy was it BUSY! We had such a great time learning about spiders. Early in the week we did a fun little craftivity after learning about spider webs. The kids used glue and sparkles (BTW, we did this activity on Tuesday and I am STILL covered in sparkles even as I write this post here at home) to make their own webs, and used construction paper to make a spider...

(oops...I forgot to take a picture of the final products!)

On Thursday, one of my kidlets brought in this little beast for our "Exploration Station" literacy centre:

*BLEGHHH!!!* I strongly dislike absolutely loathe spiders and this one lived on my desk for two days. No thank you. 

The kids named her "Webby" and were totally fascinated by her. Although I told the kiddies we could keep all of the spider decorations until Halloween, Webby has to go!!! 

Anyways, back to what we have been up to all week! One thing we did to reinforce our new spider knowledge is make our own nonfiction book all about spiders. 

(I particularly love this activity because I will have the kids keep this book in their book boxes for a couple weeks for them to read. It is simple enough for my little ones who need some extra confidence, and will help build fluency for my confident readers)

And today was our Spider Celebration! In the morning we made "Arachnid Hats" with one spider fact on each of the 8 legs. They turned out to be all kinds of adorable and the kids wore them all day....and so did I of course!

During math, we rotated through spider-themed math centres. The first centre was a patterning centre:

Although we finished our patterning unit a couple weeks ago, I like keeping one of my centres as a patterning centre for occasional review.

In our Number Sense and Numeration unit right now, we are focusing on basic addition:

Here's a bunch of worksheets I've created to practice this skill:

(click the pics to download your FREE copies)

So the next math centre reinforces this very important skill:

(Grab the above web mat HERE)

 In the pic above, the kiddies use mini spiders (from the dollar store) to solve problems of 1 more, 1 less, 2 more, and 2 less. 

At the beginning of this week I had a couple firsties who were just not grasping the concept. And now, only a couple days later, I am seeing lightbulbs go off all over the place! That is just too exciting to me!!! 

Then we had a survey centre. In a couple of weeks we will be learning about data management and graphing so I thought this would be a sweet and simple introduction to all that great stuff!

The kids walked around the class with clipboards and surveyed their classmates to find out who was afraid of spiders and who was not...

And I just HAD to include this next picture. I told them to show me what their scariest spider was going to look like and, oh, the faces I got...

 The next centre was a Colour by Number worksheet. A super simple activity, but it reinforces key concepts we have been working on (numeral recognition and formation, and reading and working with colour words)...

 Last, but not least, we had a Memory Game centre. There were 5 pairs of different spider pictures and the kiddies had to take turns--#ProblemSolvingSkills--matching pairs of the upside-down cards (image recognition, attention, and memory*)...

 And, of course, I had to show them and episode of the Magic School Bus <3 "The Magic School Bus Spins a Web" As you can tell, they were glued...

 It was so awesome hearing them whisper during the show: "Look! There are the spinnerets!" "I bet you that's a trap door spider...I was right!" etc.etc.etc Too cute.

Oh yes! I almost forgot to mention one last activity we did earlier in the week. I have been introducing the kiddies to basic letter writing so I thought it would be perfect to have them write a letter to either our principal or vice principal, telling them all about what we have been learning (the kids are SO proud of their new spider knowledge and I wanted them to have the opportunity to share that). And, of course, any form of writing is always perfect for reinforcing all of the writing rules we are striving to perfect by the end of grade one (punctuation, capitals, complete ideas, letter formation, spelling, etc.)

Then we wrote a "cover letter" altogether to slip in the envelope (*modelled writing!*)

Alrighty, I think that about wraps up the longest post ever...And I hear a glass of wine calling my name. Have a great weekend everyone!