Spiders are such a fun theme to learn about and fit into our fall farm and even Halloween themes coming up! I’m all in as long as the spiders aren’t real! Our cute little clothespin spider is perfect for toddlers and preschoolers to practice counting from 1 to 8, practice 1:1 correspondence, and strengthen their fine motor skills. That’s a lot of skills jam-packed into this busy bag learning center!
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Creating the Spider Busy Bag
To put together one of these cute little spiders, you’ll need black cardstock (or quality construction paper). I am obsessed and am getting quite lazy with the activities I am putting together because I cut everything I can with my Cricut Explore nowadays! I cut 2 sets of circles for each spider to give them added thickness and sturdiness for my preschoolers’ little hands.
Cut out black circles and glue them together. My circles were just under 4 inches in diameter and worked perfectly!
Hole punch 8 dots for each spider. We made 4 spiders for my classroom.
Glue the hole punched dots on to the spider. I glued 4 on each side leaving enough room in between for the clothespins to fit on easily.
I added googly eyes to my spiders and taped black yarn to the back of them. My preschoolers love when we do things that are hanging on the wall (like our sticky shape wall) and not just sitting on the table. Our spiders will be hanging from the windows in my classroom!
Now it’s time to play!
Practice counting the spider leg clothespins as each one is added to a dot. I used the mini-sized clothespins that I found. They were a great size for our 4 inch spider!
When the legs are all on the spider, practice counting backwards from 8 as each one is taken off!
This will easily become one of our favorite busy bags! And it took me just a few minutes to put together.
View all of our busy bag activities {HERE}.
This spider is MUCH cuter than the real one we found in our preschool classroom! I posted that one over on instagram! EEK!
Disclosure: I received a Cricut Explore One and supplies. All opinions are my own.
[…] As I mentioned in my previous post, we are starting to move away from a slightly autumnal theme towards some spider based activities, as both the seasons and Little Beans interests shift. All the big spiders have been coming out to hunt before winter takes hold, and Little Bean has found these leggy creatures fascinating. She also loves to sing Incy Wincy Spider. So we made our own Incy Wincy inspired by this post. […]