My Favorite First Grade Spider Lessons…

Since my original post here., I have honed and improved my spiders lessons. Here’s the simple approach.

Lesson 1: I read the Hey Little Ant book and we talk about the perspective of ants and spiders. Should you or should you not squish the ant? What if it was a spider? The students do a short writing piece and draw a picture about what they would do. I tell students to be looking for spiders and ants on the playground. We sing the spider song in Deanna Jump’s spider unit. (I repeatedly sing this every time I come while teaching spiders.

Lesson 2: I share a spider power point with lots of different spiders. We talk about which ones are poisonous and which ones aren’t. We also discuss spider body parts.

Lesson 3: We build the spiders which you see pictured in this post. I give the children labels for the spider body parts. If students do everything correctly, I give them a bow (Deanna Jump’s idea) which they can turn into a girl spider’s hair bow or a boy spider’s bow tie.

The children really enjoy this, and it brings happiness to the hallway which in turn makes me happy!