Never the same 2 days running: Retrospective Spiders

Monday, 15 August 2011

Retrospective Spiders

This is one of the first lapbooks we made way back in 2008 :0)

I did have lots more photos of all the things we did but, in the process of writing this post, I discovered that CD is not the best method of storing photos :0( Fortunately, we still have the lapbook and I was able to salvage a few pictures. There's no hairy tarantulas to look at or any of the other crafts we did though.

Lapbook photos

I glued two opened-out document wallets back-to-back to make a double-sided lapbook. Each side had a flap made out of an A4 folder which I stapled together along the long open side and across the bottom so that it could hold worksheets and artwork. I attached these to the centre panel of each folder with duct tape. One side of the lapbook was about spiders in general and the other concentrated on The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle.
Each child made a collage of a spider in a web on the front of their flap. Boykin was only just 3 at the time, so his spider collage was a means to help him learn about numbers up to 8. The Girl's spider web had printed spider vocab words as some of the strands of silk.
I made some of the minibooks in octagonal shapes to go along with the 8 theme and the Girl had a very long accordian book of the 8 times table. A lot of the minibooks are made out of worksheets that I have printed 4 to a page. My favourite minibook design has to be the foodchain one - it folds up so small but has a surprising amount of space. We made some sequencing cards by making rubbings of the webs in The Very Busy Spider book which I laminated for durability. In fact, I laminated lots and lots of bits and bobs in this lapbook - my laminator was a very new toy back then :0) To keep the lollystick puppets in place in the lapbook, I stapled two strips of cardboard togather at regular-ish intervals and then glued the back of one strip into the book. I just slotted the lollysticks in between two staples. It works really well, none of the little puppets seem to fall out accidently, and they are easy to get out when you want them.
We also went to a Zoolab display and saw tarantulas, made woolly webs and spiders, did lots with play-doh, acted out Little Miss Muffet at least 100 times (really), sang songs, read stories, watched videos and made lots of spider shaped food for a feast with friends :0)