Crafts with 1st and 2nd Grade

In the afternoons on Thursdays I teach the 1^st and 2^nd grade class on the topic of Crafts/Cooking. You might already be chuckling picturing 6 and 7 year olds doing cooking and crafting, but it’s actually a lot of fun. They’re so enthusiastic about ANYTHING that we do. It could be lining up at the door and they’re just like, “YES!! Let’s do it!!!” Anyway, I’ve had a great time finding projects for the class, and linking them in to the topics they’re currently studying.  The class is reading Charlotte’s Web, and so last week we did a simple weaving project to make a spider web with plates.

But before we did that, we did an activity. Before the class, I set up a yarn web in the hallway outside their classroom. They didn’t see it as they came in from break, so after we talked about spiders and their features, I suggested we go see a spider I had seen in the bathroom across the hall. You should have seen their eyes as we walked into the hallway and were blocked by a giant, tricky web! One of the students even yelped in fear and attached herself to my leg. But when they realized they’d be allow to climb through it, they were ecstatic.  They had fun pretending to be bugs escaping from a large spider, and then we returned to our craft time.