The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Last week, I briefly mentioned that this year I am using the curriculum Growing Up Wild as my guide and inspiration. Click here to check out the website Growing Up Wild. We are three weeks in and I am loving it. It is simple and packed full of ideas that are right up my kids' alley! I love that even though we live in the city, I can still make this nature based program work for us. It is also very easy to stretch it across the curriculum. I am able to make one lesson last for 3 days. There are 27 lessons.. so there is our year! In addition to this resource, we are using the reading program Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and Spectrum Math for Kindergarten for Ava. We work on reading about 20 minutes a day and cover one math concept from Spectrum a day. We will start the letter of the week with Dominic in the spring. I want to wait until he turns three. For now he is participating as his interest and attention allows.

This week we dove into the world of spiders. Take a look at what was on the agenda for this week! 

We brought our science journals outside and went for a spider web hunt. Ava and Dominic had to draw pictures of all the places they found spider webs. We also searched the basement. Sorry Auntie  Carrie, we found a few, but we hope that doesn't scare you from visiting us again soon! We will make sure to clean the ceiling before you come! 

Here they are observing a spider that was in the web on their play structure.

We have music time each day. The curriculum provides great theme related songs to tunes we know! These instruments only come out during school time. This way they are not sick of the instruments before we use them! 

Here Dominic is practicing his sewing skills and making a spider  web.

We made sure to attach spiders to their completed webs! 

In the sensory table this week, there is rice along with spiders and other creepy crawlies of course! 

One of Ava's sight word work this week was to build the sight word "the" with play dough.  

We made marble painting spider webs. Even Lilly is participating in some of the activities this year! Last year she was just learning to walk!   

Here is Ava's finished marble painting spider web. 

We reviewed the sight words I, see, and the by creating an I See book. Ava dictated what she saw and illustrated it. She was so excited to be able to read it to Daddy all by herself! 

Dominic really wanted to help decorate for Halloween. And he wanted to to be scary! So, we made large spiders. While making the spiders we were able to discuss how many body parts a spider has, what the body parts are called, and how many legs spiders have. The three big kids enjoyed this project! 

This year Ava is so much more independent. She can do her own cutting and even help get materials ready! 

The internet offered us some great resources! We watched close up videos of a spider spinning a web, a spider catching a bee in the web, and a jumping spider (who does not spin a web) catching its prey. 

Ava and I created a web to hang her spider from. On the web, we recorded all the information from the "what we learned" portion of our spider KWL chart. 

Dominic's spider

Lilly's spider