Storytimeland

This week's storytime was full of creepy... crawly... spiders! From the silly to the serious, we had a great time learning all about everyone's favorite arachnid this week.

I began with a book with a tenuous connection to spiders, The Great Nursery Rhyme Disaster by David Conway.

The book tells what happens when Little Miss Muffet gets tired of being scared by that spider and decides to explore other nursery rhymes -- with disastrous results, or course. I think the kids found it funny enough, but I found on reading it aloud that reciting the nursery rhymes felt really awkward.

Next up was the tale of a kitten who is scared of pretty much everything.




Scaredy Cat by Joan Rankin lists all the things that scare a poor little kitten. Giants (his owner), Crocodiles (her shoes) and the Sucking Monster (the vacuum, of course) are among these things. But eensy weensy spiders (the poor dog's nose) he knows just how to deal with.

Not only did this one go over well -- providing a great opportunity for kids to shout out "answers" -- but it was fun to read.

 

Now it was time to talk about real spiders. I used the book Do All Spiders Spin Webs? to launch a little discussion about the types of spiders there are in the world, what makes a spider a spider, whether or not spiders are good or bad for us, and then showed some pictures of spiders from a National Geographic book and Nic Bishop's Spiders.




I took great joy in showing the kids my favorite spider. The Hawaiian Happy Face Spider. Yes, really:



The idea of a spider with a smile on his hiney was just as incredibly hilarious to the kids as I was hoping.

For a little more fun we read Aaaarrgghh! Spider! by Lydia Monks.



Another good read aloud that gave the kids a chance to shout along with me. It has a good punchline, too, even if the story strains a little to get there.

The obvious choice for film was the movie version of Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Spider.




It's pretty good, although I realized for the first time today that several aspects of it don't make sense if you haven't read Diary of a Worm or Diary of a Fly. Oh. well.

For crafting, we made these great hand-print spiders.



There were a lot of kids today, so it was barely controlled chaos, but we mostly got spiders out of them and they looked *great* even if the did have anywhere from 3 -10 legs. :)