I absolutely loved Allie's Spider Web Walking activity from last week. Right after we saw it, we grabbed painters tape and started creating a spider web on our floor. We balanced on it and played her adorable game with some modified props (I didn't have spider rings, so we made our own spiders). It rained all afternoon, so we played with the spider web several other times.
My brain has been focused on learning sight words lately (since several friends have asked for ideas for their kindergarteners), so we created our own spider web sight word activity.
Materials Needed: paper plates, small pieces of paper, scissors, marker, tape, BOB Kindergarten Sight Words books, and a spider web taped on the floor.
1. First we made our spiders. They look more like crabs to me than spiders, but oh well.
2. Then we wrote the sight words we were talking about in our BOB Kindergarten Sight words books onto pieces of scrap paper.
3. Next we taped the words to the tops of the spiders.
4. And then we dropped the spiders on different spots on the web. We only focused on three words at a time because we didn't want my little guy to be overwhelmed. Older kids could definitely do more.
This activity could be done in a lot of ways. Here are two of the ways we tried it:
The first way we tried it was for me to read the story aloud and then I stopped after I read one of the sight words. My little guy then balanced on the web (as much as he could... this was tough for him!) and walked towards the spider with the correct word on it. He picked up the "spider" and read the word. We kept reading the story till we found the next sight word, and then we tried to find that corresponding spider and work. This method didn't promote reading fluency necessarily, but it helped us work on listening and then identifying the sight word when we heard them.
Lots of Actions
For the next round, we put the sight word BOB books down and my little guy and I walked around the web... trying not to fall. We took turns saying the name of a sight word to find. If he said "can," then I had to walk around the web, find the correct labeled spider, pick it up and yell "I can!" with my arms in the air. When I was in gymnastics as a little girl, that was what we had to do once we completed our somersault... or whatever. After that, the next person had a turn. We came up with body actions for each sight word (jump= jumping up and down, on= we had to stand "on" the spider, can= yell "I can")... and we made up silly sentences while we walked around the web using our words. For example, if it was my turn and the word was "jump," I would say a sentence like, "I like to jump on the trampoline."
We worked on expanding our sentences and adding more detail, but mostly we worked on correctly using the sight word in context. It was silly and educational... so we had a lot of fun.
Can you think of any other ways you could play this game? What other skills could you try to teach/embed, yet still make it fun?
If you haven't read No Time for Flashcard's post about her spider web activity, head over there right now. I loved it! If you've tried this out and posted it, send along the link, I'd love to read about it!