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One of my favorite kindergarten units for October is All About Spiders! In this post, I’m sharing some of my favorite spider activities for kindergarten to help you plan your own thematic unit. Your students can practice literacy, math, and fine motor skills as they learn all about spiders!
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There are many ways to bring spider fun to your literacy practice. Your students will have so much fun with these activities, they won’t even realize they’re hard at work practicing literacy skills!
The first step in a spider unit is to learn all about spiders! Choose a picture book about spiders to read with your students, then fill out an anchor chart with the new facts you have learned. Each student can then use their new knowledge to create this spider craft. These look great on a fall bulletin board!
Students can also create a schema flip book with facts about spiders. The adorable spider craft, made with black construction paper, is a fun way for students to practice their fine motor skills!
“The Very Busy Spider” by Eric Carle will be a favorite with your kindergartners! After reading the book together as a class, you can create an anchor chart to discuss the order that the animals visited the spider.
After creating the anchor chart together as a class, students can complete a lift-the-flap activity that puts the animals and their sounds in the correct sequence. Students will love retelling the story with the help of this activity!
What would a kindergarten spider unit be without the Itsy Bitsy Spider? You can create a large poster with this nursery rhyme to recite it together as a class! This poster can also serve as an anchor chart to help your students practice sequencing.
After your students have had plenty of time to learn the sequence of the nursery rhyme, they can create their own flip book!
Students can also practice story retelling with fun Itsy Bitsy Spider craft! This retelling activity uses a straw and a plastic spider ring for students to show the spider traveling up and down the water spout.
You can also add some spider-themed fun to beginning sounds practice! Students can match spiders to the correct webs based on the beginning sounds. This activity is a great addition to literacy centers or morning work!
There are many ways to bring the spider theme to your math practice. These math activities can be used throughout the school day, including morning work, math centers, and small group instruction.
Your students will love counting practice with fingerprint spiders. They can add the correct number of fingerprint spiders to each column of the worksheet.
Students can also practice one-to-one correspondence as they count dots and match them to the numbers. They will glue the numbers to each of the eight legs of this fun spider craft!
You can also help your students practice counting with mini readers. Students can add the correct number of spiders to each web to match the sentence on each page. In another reader, students can practice counting on. Each page has a spider with some legs, then the students can add more legs for a total of eight.
An activity that is sure to be a favorite with your students is Shake, Spill, and Count. Students will take turns shaking a cup of plastic spiders and then spilling them onto a spider web mat.
After counting the number of spiders that land on the web, students can find the number card to match. Your students will want to play this game again and again, so this is great counting practice!
Your students can practice ten frames with this spider theme activity. Students can match each ten frame to the correct number. This number sense practice is perfect for a math station!
When you introduce a spider unit to your students, there are bound to be students that say “Yuck!” Use this as a discussion starter and math activity! You can ask your class if they are afraid of spiders and graph the results on an anchor chart.
After creating and discussing the anchor chart together as a class, your students can complete their own graphing practice worksheet.
This interactive reader combines counting activities, spider facts, and literacy practice, all in one activity! Students will be so excited to take these books home to show their families everything they learned about spiders during this thematic unit.
Finish up your spider unit with a tasty spider treat! Students can use Oreo cookies, pretzel sticks, and M&M’s to create their own spider snacks. This is the perfect way to end your week of spider fun!
With so many fun spider activities to choose from, you might be wondering what to try first! I have created a resource with everything you need for your own spider unit. This unit includes all of the activities pictured above and more! I have even included a five-day plan that maps out a suggested order for the activities in this unit. These activities can also be spread out over two weeks if you would prefer a longer thematic unit.
If you would like to take a closer look at everything included in this resource, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or on Teachers Pay Teachers.
I hope that these spider activity ideas will help you plan your next thematic unit! If you’d like to save this post for later, be sure to add this pin to your favorite teaching board. You’ll be able to quickly find this post the next time you’re looking for spider activities to use with your kindergarten class! If you’d like to see an example of how I put together this unit in my own classroom, you can check out this post.
These alphabet books will have students dive deep into learning about each letter of the alphabet while eager to see what activity they get to complete next!
