Spiders Are Not Insects

Dear Parents,

On Monday we played in the yard all morning. We read two books about spiders, sang The Itsy Bitsy Spider, and made spiders using pipe cleaners. The children chose between making black or red spiders. When we came in from the yard, someone found a teeny tiny spider in our classroom. After we all got close observations of him, we left him on the windowsill.

While Emily was taking pictures of everyone, we added eyes to our spiders. The children pretended they were all babies of our big spider that has been hanging in the classroom since October.  Most of our spiders have one or two eyes although we read in a book that spiders can have up to eight eyes. We saw pictures of two, four, six, and eight eyed spiders. We read Please Don’t Step On Us! and Be Nice To Spiders. Both books said spiders like to eat insects that bite us. 

On Wednesday, while half the class was in music, drumming and dancing, the rest of us played with green play dough in the classroom. Children made snowmen, snakes, a tarantula, a scorpion, pancakes, balls, snails, a drill, and a volcano. 

We’re also reading: The Very Busy Spider, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, When I Feel Angry, Be Kind, Rotten Ralph, and Your Brain.

On Thursday morning we got three sticks from the yard, and took turns weaving ribbon around and around the sticks, to create a big spider web. During circle everyone took turns putting their spider in the web. 

In the big room we had turns playing in our dirt bin. We added pretend worms to it. Someone asked, “Is this a compost bin?” 

On Friday we started the morning building magnet tile homes for our bugs, playing with our potions, and saying good morning to all the spiders in our web. Some of us joined the tangram table where we built a giant honeycomb. The bees were busy buzzing, and one friend found a single tangram block that was not like the others. We decided to make that one our queen bee. We built castles with blocks, buried worms in our compost and ran laps in the big room.

Have a nice long weekend,

Therese and Nicole

Insects Have Six Legs and Three Body Parts

Dear Parents,

We began our week on Monday by connecting sixteen paper plates that we painted Friday, to make one enormously long caterpillar. The children took turns connecting him with pipe cleaners. We added red pipe cleaners for feet. He has more feet than we can count. The class kept wanting to add more and more and more feet, so we did. We wondered if he would turn into a huge butterfly.

We spent the whole morning outside on Monday.

We read Bugs during circle and the children had many questions: How do bugs communicate? Why do we kill bugs? Why do insects tell each other where to go to find food? What’s a moth?  

On Tuesday, Frank, the Bug Man, came to show us his insect collection. We saw tarantulas from South America and Mexico, a centipede from Florida, an African Giant Millipede, a praying mantis from Malaysia, and one from Vietnam. There were too many to list them all. They were all alive! We were not allowed to touch any of them.

The children had many questions and comments: “Is it pretending to be dead?” -the tarantula. “It eats poisonous snakes?” “I wanna see more insects!” “What is a diet?” “Is she making a web?” -the black widow spider who doesn’t emerge from her clear box because she is poisonous. “She's having a little nap.” “She’s really slow.” “What does it smell like?” -the smell the giant millipede emits to scare off predators. “Do you have a cockroach?” He did have hissing cockroaches from Madagascar, and we heard them hiss!  “It looks like a crab.” -the African Emperor Scorpion. “It almost looks like hair.” -the tailless whip scorpion. “Why does it have such long legs?” -to find its dinner in dark caves. “Why don’t they like light?” “Are they nocturnal?” “One time I catched fireflies.” “What are pesticides?” -when talking about the decline of the monarch butterfly and other important insects.

Needless to say, Fank keeps their attention for a while!

Music with Alex was musical. In the classroom we played with green play dough and everyone took turns getting measured for the third time this year. Most have grown one and a half to two inches since school started.

We potted our teeny tiny apple tree sprout in a cup of dirt. We’re watching it with anticipation of apples. 

On Thursday we read two books about ants, sang The Ants Go Marching One By One, and marched around the big room, down the stairs, through the sanctuary, back up, and into the big room for a pretend picnic snack.

We all made snacks on Friday. We used celery and cream cheese. While we were going to the bathroom, ants crawled on our food! Curr-ants. The children were pretty excited about the "bugs."

We read a book about snails and then found a baby snail. He looked just like the one in the book. The class knew where we should put him because we had just read that they like dark places.

Have a buggy weekend,

Therese