Spider Hunt

Boy did I have fun last week with my students in my after school club of "Green Hornets".  This club is for a growing population of students at my school who are "naturalists" at heart.  Have you ever noticed at recess the group of children that would rather look at the clouds, play in the bushes or trees, or simply pick clover? Those are our naturalists and they love the outdoors!

With all the research in the past few years that says that kids no longer want to play in the woods, I started thinking....why not?  Sure, some kids would rather play video games...but I still have a group of kids who would LOVE for us to let them play in the woods surrounding our school at recess.  And then I wonder....what about those kids who play video games??? Have they ever even been in the woods????

So...I asked one of our moms at our school (who is also a master gardener) to come to our recess time on Friday and offer some activities for the kids to participate in.  She has a growing number of kids who help her search for bugs, make leaf prints, create leaf blankets, look at stumps to learn about the weather, etc...

I also have my after school group.  Last week, we learned about spiders. I got my ideas from the  Handbook of Nature Studies blog.  

I started off by having the group eat their snack and watch some videos of spiders spinning their webs.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube with spiders spinning webs...very cool!

Then we looked at four different types of webs...

sheet webs

Filmy dome webs

Orb Web

Funnel Web

Next we went outside and searched for webs....we found some really cool ones!

The kids had their notebooks and were able to draw what they observed...

Then we came back in and listed what we found...we even snuck in the teachers lounge and found some cobwebs! 

We ended the time with big pieces of black paper and white crayons...the kids had a blast drawing what they saw!