Spiders in the Library

This past Friday, we had the opportunity to become spiders in the library. We had some awesome pictures of spiders and their webs to get us started with our activity. Then we watched a short clip from The Cat in the Hat Know a lot about That to learn how spiders build their webs.

We then gathered on the carpet in a large circle in order to create our very own spider webs.  Students discussed the roles that they would play in the completion of the project as well as how important it was for them to communicate with each other.  We had builders and observers.  While the builders were building, the observers were looking for patterns and shapes in the creation of the web.  They did a great job of explaining what shapes they saw as well as what made the shapes (vertices, sides, angels).  They also discovered that the shapes changed based on how whether you were using 2 hands to hold your string or one hand (it effected the number of vertices).  All we used was basic cotton twine that you can buy at the dollar store.  I started the spider web by passing the string to another student, they passed it on to someone else and we continued until the whole class had a part of the string.  Students then spent some time debriefing and discussing what they had to do to successfully create their spider web.