Spiders in Webs

Another creepy crawly craft that Jonah and I did this past week was "handprint spiders."

We've been working really hard on using a pencil grip on crayons, and pressing hard enough to leave a mark, as well as drawing a variety of marks like circles, horizontal lines, and vertical lines. By "working hard" I mean that we've been doing a lot of play activities to incorporate different aspects of drawing/writing.

So, for the first step of this craft, I thought I'd have him draw the web with a white crayon on gray paper. I also gave him black and dark gray so that he would have different contrasts to work with, and because he kept asking for purple, I gave him that crayon too. I was very happy to see that he has not only mastered the pencil grip on the crayon, but he was also pressing hard enough that I could see the white marks on the gray paper. He also scribbled in circular motions for the first time! So we hit a lot of "milestones" with this project!

After he was finished making the spider web, I helped him dip his hand into purple paint (black would create a better illusion that it is a spider, but the kid insisted on purple!) and he put his handprint on the spider web. I then helped him dip his other hand in the paint, and guided him to put this handprint so that the thumbs of both prints are overlapping. Younger children will need a lot of help and guidance on this. Where the thumbs are overlapped is the head, and each finger is a spider leg. You can add googley eyes to polish off the look. Here is our spider before I added a face. Daryl said it didn't look like a spider at all, but he has no imagination.

With the face drawn in (I just drew some eyes and a smiley face with a sharpie) it looks like a spider.

I paired this with an activity called "tickle spider," a book from my preschool teaching days called "Don't Squish the Spider!" Which apparently is no longer available anywhere (it is a british children's book) but I'm sure that your local librarian would have something up her sleeves if you asked for a children's book about spiders. And of course, "The Itsy Bitsy Spider."

We counted the spider's legs when we were done making it, which is something Jonah enjoys doing a lot. Sometimes he'll stand in front of the fridge and point, saying syllables as if he is counting the legs on his spider!