(bright music) - Hello, little learners.

Welcome back to our pre-K and TK classroom.

My name is Mrs. Lara.

Can you tell me your name?

Let's see if I can make your special letter today.

Yesterday was A.

Let's see if I make yours today.

So I'm going to need a big line.

See if it stays put.

Ooh it did, and a little line.

What letter have I made?

Letter T, is that your special letter?

Maybe your name's Timothy or Thomas.

Don't worry if I didn't pick your special letter, it's coming.

So today is day four of the five days that we're going to be together and talking about spiders.

That's right.

Something that some people are a little bit scared of, but I think after reading today's book, you're going to find that spiders actually help us.

And they're not as bad and scary as you may think.

So here's day four.

One, two, three, four.

One more day of talking about spiders before we move on.

So like I said, we have a lots to do today around spiders.

And the first thing we're going to start with is a little spider finger play.

So I have my little spider puppet friend here, her name's Charlotte, and she's going to help us.

But if you don't have a puppet friend or a spider that you can use for our song, you can use your hands.

That's right.

Okay, let's sing our song, here it goes.

♪ There's a spider on my knee, on my knee ♪ ♪ Oh gee ♪ ♪ There's a spider on my knee, on my knee ♪ ♪ Oh gee ♪ ♪ I keep telling it to go, but it always tells me no ♪ ♪ There's a spider on my knee, on my knee ♪ ♪ Oh gee ♪ ♪ Now the spiders on my nose, on my nose ♪ ♪ I froze ♪ ♪ There's a spider on my nose, on my nose ♪ ♪ I froze ♪ ♪ I keep telling it to go, but it always tells me no ♪ ♪ There's a spider on my nose, on my nose ♪ ♪ I froze ♪ Now the spider's going to our belly.

♪ There's a spider on my belly, on my belly ♪ ♪ Whoa, Nelly ♪ ♪ There's a spotter on my belly, on my belly ♪ ♪ Whoa, Nelly ♪ ♪ I keep telling it to go, but it always tells me no ♪ ♪ There's a spider on my belly, on my belly ♪ ♪ Whoa, Nelly ♪ ♪ Now the spider's on my hair, on my hair ♪ ♪ Goodness, where ♪ ♪ There's a spider on my hair, on my hair ♪ ♪ Goodness, where ♪ ♪ I keep telling it to go, and it always tells me no ♪ ♪ There's a spider on my hair, on my hair ♪ ♪ Goodness, where ♪ Now we're going to put our spider down on my chair right here.

Now remember you can keep practicing the names of your body parts by extending the song.

But right now it's time to move on to our letter.

I think Miss Maria delivered it earlier.

(doorbell ringing) There's our doorbell!

So here is our letter.

And of course it always starts off with our greeting which is dear Mrs. Lara.

And we're going to start on the left and move to the right.

Remember we have a new song to the tune "The Wheels on the Bus."

♪ When I read the words I read left to right ♪ ♪ Left to right, left to right ♪ ♪ When I read words I read left to right ♪ ♪ That makes me a strong reader ♪ So let's read our letter.

Is it true that spiders are not insects?

Ooh, let's see, they have a lot of things that are the same.

Spiders like to crawl around and so do insects, but it is true, they are not insects.

And that they have eight legs and eight eyes, that is true.

Imagine what you would look like with eight eyes.

What would you see in the world around you?

I wonder.

Do all spiders spin webs?

I have so many questions!

So do I. I realized that I didn't know a whole lot about spiders because generally I avoid them.

Or if I see them, I run and scream "Ah!"

But now I'm curious.

I want to study them like a scientist studies the world around them.

So we have a book here that's going to tell us a little bit about spiders, and the title of the book is "Spiders."

See right here in big letters.

Did you know just like you books have a name and it's usually in these large letters right in front.

And the author is Gail Gibbons.

She wrote the words in the story.

Now we're going to read this book.

It is a little bit of a longer book, but it has lots of interesting facts about spiders.

It is a nonfiction text, which means everything in here is true and real.

So let's turn the page and see what we learn about spiders in this book.

It says, "Spiders may look scary, but most of them don't hurt people.

There are almost 50,000 different kinds of spiders."

50,000 is a huge number.

Wow.

"Spiders come in many shapes and sizes.

Some are so tiny, they're no bigger than a speck of dust."

So imagine the dirt that you may see on the ground.

If you pick up just one little speck, that's how small a spider can be.

"Others can be as big as a dinner plate."

So when you eat dinner, look at the plate and imagine seeing a spider that big.

Oh no!

"Most spiders are brown, gray or black, but some have bright colors.

The first spiders lived about 400 million years ago, even before dinosaurs roamed the Earth."

So before dinosaurs, there were spiders.

"Spiders belong to a group of animals called arachnids."

Can you say that word?

Arachnids.

"The word arachnid comes from an old Greek legend.

Once there was a woman named Arachne who was angry when she lost a weaving contest against the goddess Athena.

When Arachne died, Athena turned Arachne's body into a spider so she could weave forever."

Look, is a spider an insect?

No!

Here's a spider's body.

It has two parts.

So it has an abdomen and it has a cephalo- I can't even say it myself, it's a tongue twister.

I'll slow it down and we'll say it together.

Cephalothorax, cephalothorax.

There it came.

Cephalothorax means head and chest.

So two body parts.

Now most insects have two big eyes, whereas a spider has eight eyes.

Insects have wings, spiders do not.

And insects have antennae like this.

Spiders sometimes that fangs.

Insects have six legs and spiders have eight.

Let's keep going.

"Most male spiders are smaller than female spiders.

When a male spider finds a mate, he has to be careful.

If the female spider is hungry, she might eat him.

Some male spiders do a dance and bring in insects to attract a female."

Well that would be scary.

"Most mother spiders lay their eggs and enclose them in a strong silk egg sack."

Right here.

"Baby spiders are called spiderlings.

Most spider mothers don't stay with their babies.

Some spiderlings care for themselves as soon as they are born.

They run up to the highest place they can find.

The spiderlings then spin out long streamers of silk."

Ooh, like our story, "The Very Busy Spider."

"A breeze lifts them up and carries them to their new home.

This way of traveling is called ballooning."

Look.

"As spiderlings grow its outer hard skin called an exoskeleton, becomes tight.

The skin tears near the legs and along the abdominal sides.

The spider sheds the skin by climbing out.

This is called molting."

Now do humans molt?

No, our skin grows with us, doesn't it?

Imagine if we lost our skin.

Now, most spiders can molt five to 10 times.

Wow, that's a lot of skin they're losing.

We'll read just a little bit more, and then we'll move on to our foundational skill.

This whole part of the book is about spiders being weavers.

"They spin webs to catch their food.

There are spiders that we've tangled webs.

The spider spins a tangled mass of silk, and when an insect is trapped, the spider runs out to get it.

Other spiders weave sheet webs."

Like that.

"And the spider will hang upside down beneath the web to catch an insect.

There's also grass spiders, and they weave a funnel web that kind of looks like this.

And here's that triangle spider I was talking about.

They weave webs that are in the shape of a triangle.

"There's an orb weaving spider that spins a pattern of many circles, and the most beautiful web," it says "is the orb web."

There's the wolf spider, doesn't spin a web at all.

He actually hides in the rocks.

And then when a little insect comes, trap!

Munches on him.

And then there's a really cool water spider.

I have to read this part.

"One unusual kind of spider lives underwater.

It weaves a bell shaped web.

Then it fills the web with many tiny air bubbles stuck on its body hairs.

The spider stays there breathing the air from the bubbles and waits to catch water insects."

It's a little bit scary.

When I go into a pond, I'm going to be looking for these types of spiders.

And then if you want to keep reading the text, it talks about some poisonous spiders, like a Black Widow spider or a Tarantula.

But remember most spiders won't hurt humans.

So I hope that you check out this book and finish reading it, because there's tons more facts at the very back that we won't get to today.

Now for our foundational skill today, I thought we would review all that we learned about our spider friends.

So let's see, here's our spider drawing.

Do you remember how many body parts a spider has?

That's right, two.

Let's see, and a spider has eight eyes.

Let's see if I drew it correctly.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Eight eyes.

And then how many legs does a spider have?

Eight legs, too, that's right.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Now if you remember from our book, spiders come in all shapes and sizes.

Some are as small as a speck of dust, and some are as big as a dinner plate.

Ooh, there's some really big spiders that can be found in the desert.

Ooh, you should look them up with a grownup and see what you think.

Spiders are not insects.

The book talked about how spiders and insects are different, and most spiders use webs to catch their food.

Not all do.

And spider babies are called spiderlings.

That's right, they're tiny little spiders.

Now do the mama spider stay with the baby spiders?

Not all the time.

Remember baby spiders climb really high, and then they fly in the wind and leave a little silk thread behind them to weave their own web and have their own baby spiderlings.

So I hope that you learned a little bit about spiders and our spider friends, because right now we're going to go over to our project place where I have a fun activity where we're going to make our own spider web and make our spiders move.

But I won't tell you how just yet.

So let's walk over there.

All right, here's what we're going to need for this activity.

I want you to try to make this project at home.

You're going to need a paper plate, you can use a recycled one, a black marker, and maybe a little spider friend.

Now what I wanted to show you was this.

Look, I have my little spider friend here and he's on the web, and then I'm going to make him move.

But how did I do that?

How did I make my spider friend move?

Let's see if he moves.

There he goes, oh, he's moving all over the place here.

Hard to tell.

I'm not touching him, and it's not the plate moving.

It's actually magnets.

So we're going to explore magnets today.

Now in order to make this activity, you just draw a spider web on a paper plate and put a little magnet on the back of a spider.

And then you can use it to kind of move it around all over the place.

Now why did that spider stick to the magnet?

Well magnets are attracted to things that are metal, and they can make those things move around.

So here I have my magnet wand, and we're going to experiment and see what other things we can make move around like our spider.

So I have a few fun things to show you how magnets work here.

This is magnet marbles, so let's see if they're attracted to 'em.

Ooh, look at that!

We caught a few.

Now I bought these at the store.

They're actually filled with special metals that make them stick to our magnet.

Regular marbles that are made of glass might not stick because remember, magnets are attracted to things that are metal.

Now if you buy some things, you can really play around with them and make different forms, because they're also attracted to each other.

You can make like a little pile.

Whereas most marbles won't stick.

There it is.

(laughing) And then I wanted to show you this stuff, which is really fun.

Again, magnets are attracted to metal, so you can make your little spider move on the web because we attached a little magnet to the back of it.

But look at what happens when I use these iron kind of shavings and I put them on the plate and then I move my magnet over them.

Look, whoa!

Do you see that?

It's sticking on there.

Now one fun activity that you can do is if you go to the park with a magnet, go investigate the sandbox because there's a lot of iron fillings in the sand and you can go investigate and find your own magnetic things there.

Hopefully it's just iron fillings that you find.

(chuckling) So we're going to experiment with other things.

I'm going to move this to the side, and I have a few other things that we're going to try to guess to see if they're magnetic or not.

If I attach them to the back of my spider, would they make my spider move and my spider move on the web?

So I have here some plastic dinosaurs.

Ooh, do you like dinosaurs?

I love experimenting with little toys like this.

Now they're are plastic.

Remember what I said about magnets?

Will they stick?

Let's find out.

Make your guess, make your prediction.

No, why didn't they stick?

That's right, they don't have any metal on them.

They're plastic, and plastic will not stick to a magnet.

Let's try another material.

All right, here we go.

How about these coins?

Now I have different coins here.

I have quarters and pennies and different things like this.

Let's move our magnetic wand over them and see.

They're not sticking, but they look like metal.

Do coins not stick?

Can you investigate why?

It's actually a true fact that coins will not stick to magnets.

I thought that was really interesting.

My husband tried explaining it to me and it has something to do with the type of metal they're made with that will not stick to a magnet.

Let's try something else.

Let's see, how about these keys?

Some keys laying around the house.

(keys jangling) Ooh there it is.

They're a little heavy, I can't lift them, but they will stick to my magnet.

There you go.

So the keys will stick because they're made of a special metal that is magnetic.

Let's put those away.

I have two more things that we'll use to experiment with.

All right, let's see.

I have some wood and a Popsicle sticks here.

What do you think?

Do you think that the word will be magnetic on my wand?

I don't think so, let's see.

No, not metal, won't stick.

One more material to try.

Maybe we'll get to read a few more spider facts here.

All right, let's try our crayons.

Now what do you think?

Do you think that they're going to be magnetic or not?

Remember, magnetic things usually have metal in them.

So when you look at a crayon, do you think it has metal?

Let's move our magic wand over them.

Do they move?

No crayons are not magnetic, so I'm going to put them back.

Now you can see how we made our craft, the dancing spider.

Now let's see if I can make it dance.

Here we go.

Here is our plate and our spider on top, and I'll show you how to make the web in just a little bit.

So I'm gonna put my magnetic wand at the bottom.

Ooh there it goes.

(laughing) Let's see if I can make it go anymore.

There, we can make our spider move around and dance.

Now, a fun thing that you can do with this activity if you want to make it a letter learning activity, or if a child is learning the letters in their name, on the web you can actually put different letters and have them use their magnet, and their kind of magnetic spider and move it over to the next letter in their name.

So you can see it's kind of dancing around here.

That's what I wanted it to do earlier.

Spin and spin.

All right, I promised I'd show you how to make the spider web so you can do this activity at home.

Now remember, you'll need a magnet on the back of your spider to make it a dancing spider.

So what you're going to need is a paper plate, just like this one, and a black marker.

Now to make a spider web, you're actually going to use some big lines, just like we use when we make our letters.

So I'm going to start in the middle, which is also called the center, and make some lines going out, kind of like a pizza.

That's what it's going to look like at the end.

All right, so it looks kind of like this, like stars, and then we're going to connect those lines.

So here we go.

Connect them with kind of like a smiley face all the way around, smile, just like that.

There's the first part, see?

And then I'm going to keep going just like that all the way around, just like that.

And then one more, there's room for one more.

(markers scribbling) That is how you make your spiderweb.

I've also seen them do it in a spiral like that.

So you can actually do some spirals too.

You can try different methods and see what works for you.

So I hope that you try this dancing spider activity at home.

Lots of fun things you can do with that to improve your literacy skills.

Now let's move on to our book recommendations before we say good bye.

Now I wanted to show you another Anansi book.

This one's called "Anansi's Party Time."

You can see Anansi the spider right here is on some balloons and is being lifted high up in the air.

And there's another character in pajamas.

I wonder what that character is going to do.

And a happy crocodile.

If you read the story, let me know what those characters did.

And then of course, there's our non-fiction text "Spiders."

What I love about this one is the giant pictures that they have.

See, look at this picture.

You can really see the spiders eyes.

And then in this one, it talks about catching dinner.

So let's read a little bit of this so you can get a taste.

It says "Spiders love to eat insects such as flies, wasps, and gnats.

Without them they'd be too many insects, so we should all give spiders our thanks."

It's true, I would hate to have too many flies buzzing around.

So I hope that you check out those books in the store app or in your local library.

Okay, let me grab my letters and we'll say goodbye.

Let's sing our long letter song today.

♪ A is for amazing, that's what you are ♪ ♪ B is for brave, that'll carry you far ♪ ♪ C is for caring and community ♪ ♪ And D is for determined, be the best you can be ♪ ♪ E is for empathy, caring for all ♪ ♪ F is for friends that'll catch you when you fall ♪ ♪ G is for grateful for everything around ♪ ♪ And H is for hopeful, there's more good to be found ♪ ♪ I is for imagine all the fun things we could do ♪ ♪ J is for joyful, how I feel when I'm with you ♪ ♪ K is for kind to people and animals too ♪ ♪ And L is for love, put it in all that you do ♪ ♪ M is for mindful, be present every day ♪ ♪ N is for nice words in everything you say ♪ ♪ O is for original, always be you ♪ ♪ And P is for persevere until you make it through ♪ ♪ Q is for quiet those bad thoughts ♪ ♪ R is for remember all the greatness that you've got ♪ ♪ S is for strong body and mind ♪ ♪ T is for talent why not make yours being kind ♪ ♪ U is for unique, special, and loved ♪ ♪ V is for victorious, always rise above ♪ ♪ Then W's for worthy and wonderful too ♪ ♪ X don't ex out those mistakes, they're what make you ♪ Y and Z are left, so I'll Z you tomorrow.

Goodbye.

(bright music)