A fear of creepy crawlies, and fear in general, is a normal development stage for children. Spiders in particular are often feared for no other reason than “it’s a spider!”. Having observed children react with great interest and curiosity at a captured spider, I have decided to spend some time looking more closely at our eight legged friends, in the hope of desensitising and lessening this fear. All classes have sat round the fire circle this week sharing their prior knowledge of spiders with their peers. Their thoughts included: “Spiders are insects!” “Spiders suck blood!” “They can kill you!”
Eight legs and eight eyes, wow! The children’s first piece of interesting information about spiders. They had many questions:
“How do they all fit on such a tiny body?” “What do they eat and how do they catch their prey?”
Spiders catch their prey in three ways; in webs, by pouncing on them and by spitting at them!
“How do they eat their prey?”
This question, and answer, caused huge uproar and disgust amongst the children. So, I’ll leave it up to you to ask them the answer!
Spiders are arachnids not insects.
The children were fascinated to know why I like spiders so much. It is because they help us by keeping pest and insect levels down, they are also fascinating to watch spinning webs.
Another interesting fact from one of the Year 2 children, was that spiders eat their own webs to replace lost energy. I shall be passing that gem on to the rest of Pre-Prep next week.
All the children took on different challenges relating to spiders. Some made spiders from natural things found on the woodland floor, others set off on a spider hunt, overturning logs and looking under bushes. The best collection of webs were found in an old storage shed, but the best spiders were found in the salt box at the end of the drive. The children took a dead spider back to the fire circle and identified it using a book – it was a common house spider. The children enjoyed standing in a circle throwing a ball of wool to each other to create a spider’s web. Catching the ball of wool was hard enough for some, but the trickiest part was when they had to do the task in reverse. Nursery enjoyed eating their snack and singing ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ around the fire circle.
Mrs Wilson
