Spider web craft activityPosted: 29/10/2014
Make a spider web collage – perfect for practising fine motor skills and for some sticky, gooey fun!
ToddlerGirl is settling in at preschool at the moment and I am staying with her for a few sessions to help the transition. Today, I was interested to see the children learning all about spider webs, including making a giant one together (doing some large scale weaving) and a smaller one with pipecleaners.
This inspired a great afternoon activity at home, making our own spider web collage picture. I drew a very rough spider web onto some card, then laid this out with strands of wool and gloopy glue. The idea was for ToddlerGirl to paint glue along the lines of the web and stick the strands of wool along these to make a raised web.
It didn’t quite work like that, despite ToddlerGirl’s enthusiasm. The wool didn’t stick that well so she couldn’t do the activity completely by herself as I’d hoped. But we got round this with me holding the wool on the line and ToddlerGirl coating it liberally with glue.
This worked thankfully and we soon had a spider web ready for decorating. Now came ToddlerGirl’s favourite part: squeezing glitter glue onto the web to add some lovely sparkle. She had to work really hard to get the glue out of the ‘pens’, which I’m sure was great exercise for the muscles in her hands and fingers.
She spent a long time ensuring the glitter glue covered each segment. I then found some little black sequin spiders and silver webs to finish the picture. To begin with, she only wanted to put one spider in the middle of the web, surrounded by lots of the silver webs, as ‘spiders live in the middle of spider webs’. I could see the logic! After a while, though, she decided there would be some spider friends around the outside! We discovered a new gluing technique; after she dumped a load of spiders into the gloopy glue (!), she realised she could paint these onto the picture with the paintbrush, instead of sticking them individually. This proved a fascinating concept!
Our picture was finished just in time for me to concentrate on making dinner. The mess was actually fairly minimal, just some sticky hands to clean, and ToddlerGirl was very proud of the end result. I was also very impressed with myself for managing a craft activity while juggling BabyGirl (not literally – but I did have to give her a feed halfway through and was relieved that this didn’t see ToddlerGirl running amok round the room with the glitter glue!)
All in all a lovely afternoon’s entertainment. This would make a good Halloween activity or could be paired with doing Incy Wincy Spider or reading a book like The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle.