As we were doing this activity I was hoping that my kids would accept spiders a bit more but a little later we saw one and they screamed so obviously this didn’t help HA! Don’t let this picture fool you—it was so so so easy to make and do (see second picture for a better look at the design).

If you haven’t noticed I try to add as many concepts to an activity as possible so instead of just working on  fine motor and adding beads I added the extra step of patterning because…why not? This thinking always helps me in the classroom to quickly assess many concepts at once, when time is limited!

We started with 7 black pipe cleaners. I held 4 together evenly and wrapped the other 3 pipe cleaners around the center for the “head,” glued on two googly eyes, shaped the legs to look creepy crawly and had my kiddos add beads to create patterns! You don’t have to use the same color pipe cleaners or beads as me–it might be fun to make a rainbow spider! Again this took about 2 minutes to set up!