Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider

Posted by tyan (Singapore, Singapore) on 16 September 2009 in Art & Design.

A friend gave the boys Eric Carle's Telling Time with The Very Busy Spider and I decided to use it as the 'base material' for some home learning for the boys. I found some very interesting and good resources online on homeschooling,and there is this interesting website that uses Eric's books for literature-based home learning. I got many of my ideas from here.

We read the book,about this very busy spider who spent the whole day spinning her web, at various times of the day, different animals came to ask her to do something else but she was too busy spinning her web. So we learnt from the book how to tell time with the hour and minute hand on the book, and the sounds that different animals made.

We enact 'Little Miss Muffet', I acted as Spider and the boys became Little Miss Muffets eating their curd and whey. They loved the dramatization. There was also ready-to-print accordian book(the blue one) that comprised of some words that start with the letter S. Then there is the word recognition activity from Itsy-Bitsy Spider.

When Caleb came home from school, we continued to make 4 spiders,i cut out 4 different coloured circles with 8 legs each,mixed the colours up and they get to learn counting,colour sorting from trying to make the spiders, which we later attached to the back of the clock to remind them about time.

Anyway, in my zeal, I forgot all about the kids' dinner cooking in the kitchen. Yeah, all burnt. And a wasted pot. DOUBLE SIGH. I thought I could multi-task quite well.