This year, our family, like many, are deciding to stay home for Halloween. Instead of going out trick-or-treating, we are going to have a celebration with just our small family, complete with costumes, decorations, games, and some treats. This is where our spider web weaving Halloween activity for preschoolers is being enjoyed.
My ECE classroom partner and I once had a similar activity in our classroom with our young students when they were incredibly interested in spiders. They enjoyed creating and decorating the web with insects and spiders for a couple of weeks. I had no idea what would come of this spider web weaving activity with my own children.
Weaving a Spider Web
Exploring Materials
For this Halloween activity for preschoolers, we needed to decide what material we would weave onto our wooden banister. If you have read my blogs, you know there are two things I love when I am teaching little ones: learning through exploration and developing growth mindset. Aha! Here is my chance to pull in some science and exploration.
We talked about what makes a spider web important and read a small book about spider webs. I pulled out a few different types of string for my boys to explore. Our goal in this exploration was to decide which string would be best for our spider web. We decided a good spider web needs to meet 3 criteria:
- Be sticky to catch bugs
- Strong to stay in place, and
- A camouflaging colour, like the clear spider webs in real life.
Based on these three criteria, we explored our strings and made a little graph to help us make our decision.
We decided to use a textured ribbon. The fishing line was camouflaged and strong, but not sticky. The tape was sticky and strong but not camouflaged, and would be a bit wasteful. The ribbon was somewhat sticky, could camouflage, and is strong.
Time to Weave
Now it was time to weave our Halloween activity for preschoolers. We initially started weaving back and forth in one straight line. It didn’t quite look right, so I showed my sons the photo of the web again so we could brainstorm what we could do differently to make the web look more realistic.
It didn’t take long for my little ones to decide the lines needed to be separated more like the ones on the picture and on Spider Man’s suit. Yes! We learned from our mistake. We get to acknowledge and celebrate this mistake and the learning we took from it…why not focus on our growth mindset, too, right?
Give it Another Try
After learning from the photos and Spider Man’s suit, we recreated our spider web. We learned that if we weave in and out of the rails with the ribbon, it stays in place better and we can make cooler designs.
While we were weaving, we began to recognize some shapes in the web. We found mostly triangles and various shapes of quadrilaterals. This would be such a cool way to teach our children about quadrilaterals. I will definitely keep this in mind for another time. I hope you do, too!
“We Need Spiders, Mom.”
After we had fun looking at the shapes in our web, my sons decided we should make some spiders for it. After looking at what we had on hand, we were able to come up with a few ideas. Just using what we had was a fun way to be creative and look at the anatomy of a spider.
Some of our spiders were made with edibles, like small marshmallows, Oreos, vanilla pudding and fruit bars, while others were made with pipe cleaners, pom poms, glue, and small items for eyes. Your imagination sets the limits on how you make your spiders. Have fun exploring!
Our fun Halloween activity for preschoolers turned into a heap of learning and fun. This fun will continue as we move into our family Halloween party. Our edible spiders will be on our web as a fun and spooky snack treat! Have fun with your little Arachnologists this Halloween season!
Your friend in growth and exploration,
Belinda
Belinda is a mama to two little boys and an experienced Kindergarten teacher. She has a love of using nature and technology to enhance and motivate children’s learning. She values the use and training of growth mindset at home with her family and while teaching. Follow along with her on Pinterest.
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