Nov
Spider Unit
We had a lot of fun over the last couple of weeks learning all about spiders. I was hoping that once I learned more about spiders I wouldn’t be quite so scared of them. But that didn’t happen. They were still very interesting to learn about though, and I am still amazed at how much I learn now that I am homeschooling.
Here are just SOME of the things we did- there was just way too much to share everything!
Of course, we had to have a real spider to observe. I tried not to look at it very often 😉
We learned how spiders eat their prey by injecting venom into it, which turns the insect into liquid and then the spider drinks the food. We put our prey (a sugar cube) in a cup. Then we injected it with venom (water) and drank our prey.
We also made these cute Spider Glyphs, which you can see here.
We played a fun game where we threw little plastic spiders onto this spider web I made on the floor and added up our scores.
We did a little experiment to learn why spiders don’t stick to their webs. First Hailey put her fingers on a piece of masking tape and her fingers stuck to it. Then she dipped her fingers in vegetable oil and tried it again, and her fingers did not stick. Spiders make an oil that makes it so they do not stick to their webs.
We read about the spider life cycle and then Hailey made this Life Cycle poster.
We sang a little spider song. We sang it to the tune of 10 little Indians:
Crawl, crawl, crawl like a spider.
Crawl, crawl, crawl like a spider.
Crawl, crawl, crawl like a spider.
Crawl around your web.
We used different words in place of crawl like pounce, jump, etc.
If you click on the picture above, you can see some of the other fun things we did with spiders- made hats and some different fun snacks.
We made a Spider Schema chart.
Hailey matched up spider vocabulary words with their definitions.
Hunter and Hailey made an All About Spiders book.
Hailey observed our classroom spider and wrote down her observations.
We ended our unit with a Spider Report. Hailey picked an interesting spider (she picked the tarantula) and wrote a report about them. They really are very interesting, but if I ever saw one in person I don’t think I could handle it.
Many of the printables we used came from The Razzle Dazzle Classroom or A Day in First Grade.
We also watched these videos about spiders:
and
It was a fun and interesting unit, but I am glad I won’t have to look at anymore spiders for a while!
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