Celebrate spiders with these 13 literacy activities, collected from my archives and various educational blogs around the web.
- Sing The Itsy Bitsy Spider a cappella, play it on ukulele, or guitar, or change the words to incorporate multi-colored or differently sized spiders.
- There are many wonderful folktales about Anansi the Spider, including adaptations by Gerald McDermott and Eric A. Kimmel. Introduce little ones to this eight-legged folk hero using Raffi's song, Anansi from The Singable Songs Collection.
- Give your young friends the shivers with There's a Spider on the Floor, also by Raffi, which features a spider slowly climbing up one's body.
- Enjoy I'm a Hungry Spider, a song to the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot" which Growing Book by Book featured last Fall. The song promotes rhyming skills and phonological awareness, as well as physical movement.
- Demonstrate how a spider uses her web using Four Colorful Flies, a rhyming story I wrote about the four colorful flies who are captured one by one in a spider's web. The clip art flannel board pieces I used for the story can be seen in this post.
- Tell and retell Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider, using these free printable stick puppets created by Jessica from Littlest Scholars. Without the sticks, these pieces could also be used on the flannel board.
- Play a name game with The Silly Willy Spider. The simple verse tells of a silly spider who climbs on each child in the group in turn, then jumps onto someone else. The words are available here.
- Count down from four with the Four Little Spiders rhyme from King County Library System. It works as either a fingerplay or flannel board.
- Have kids act out the creation of a spider web using their hands with the help of Spider, Spider, a simple action rhyme.
- Visit Can Teach for the text to The Spider Poem, which explains the differences between spiders and insects. (It is the fourth poem on the linked page.)
- Teach opposites vocabulary and make kids giggle with a silly joke using Spiders, a poem shared here by a school in Billings, Montana.
- Create a Word family Spider like the one shown here, on the blog Thank God It's First Grade.
- Practice color words with this free printable sight word reader from Lydia at Owl Be in Kindergarten.
