Thursday Therapy: Spider Week!

This week focused on creepy crawly arachnids! Here's a peek:

My younger kids read The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle and played The Busy Spider Game from Maria at Communication Station. The bucket is from Target's Dollar Spot and was perfect for this week! Students in Functional Academics and Life Skills used the choice board to identify icons. I just got a new computer - which I'm very thankful for - but my Boardmaker CD didn't work. So I went low tech and used Sticky-Tac to put the game pieces in a dry-erase pocket.

I found a spider web at Dollar Tree. The plastic spiders were barely glued on, so it was easy to separate them from the web. I taped the web onto white paper, and then we practiced putting the spiders ON the web, ABOVE the web, etc and then describing where the spiders were.

3rd-5th-graders worked on Spiders: Fact and Opinion from our store, All Y'all Need. In Texas, we use TEKS instead of Common Core, and Fact/Opinion is a big part of TEKS. The students took turns reading the cards to get in practice for artic and fluency, and then we discussed why the statement was a fact or opinion. Plus, there's a recording sheet for homework!

Most groups also made eight-eyed (!) spiders inspired by Thank God It's First. Students had jobs and had to communicate to each other to complete the project.

Directions:
1) Get two sizes of black paper plates. I found sets of 20 for $1.50 at HEB. Staple the "head" to the "abdomen". Job #1 - stapler.
2) Use punches for the whites and pupils of eyes. I have circle punches from my scrapbooking days. The students had to punch out the circles as part of their job. Jobs #2 and #3 - punchers.
3) I eyeballed when I cut the strips, but they are approximately 6 inches by 1 inch. Students had to write artic or language words. It is perfectly permissible to use white crayons, but I used chalk. To prevent the chalk from smearing or rubbing off, we used a LIGHT COAT of Aqua Net, the smell of which brought about some descriptive language! Hey, I'm an 80s girl, and I like hair spray! Job #4 - sprayer.
4) Students glued the legs on. It is perfectly fine to staple the legs. The glue was kind of hard for some students because they got impatient holding the legs until the glue dried. Job #5 - gluer.
5) I wrote directions for home practice on the back.
Variations: Glue artic/language pictures on the ends of the legs or abdomen.

And, it turns out I wasn't the only one thinking spiders this week. Check out Kelly's post at Speech2U!

What did you do this week?