Friday 27th May

The children began delving into a large assortment of National Library books about insects and spiders. Jeherson became fascinated with a page showing spiderlings and a spider with an egg sac. We talked about how the spider lays it eggs and protects them in an egg sac which it makes out of its silk. We had a look on the internet and found some images including hundreds of
spiderlings hatching from an egg sac, a spider finishing weaving her egg sac and a short clip of a wolf spider which carries all of its spiderlings on its abdomen.
Taylor found a picture of a spider moulting and asked, ‘How do spiders get their old skin off and get their new skin on’. This began a discussion about how humans have a skeleton or bones inside their body, where spiders and insects don’t, their bones are on the outside, this is called an exoskeleton. As the spider grows the exoskeleton becomes too tight and a new, larger exoskeleton grows beneath. We also talked about how our skin, bones and muscles all grow together as we get older but that we also have many layers of skin and that the top layer does come off but we don’t notice it because it doesn’t come off all at once. We watched a time lapse camera clip of a rose hair tarantula moulting. It lay on its back and the abdomen split and then the spider looked like it shook and pushed off its old legs, lastly the Cephalothoraxes came off and voila!
During poetry today the children had to illustrate their poem called ‘Flies for me’ by Jill
Eggleton, it is about a spider and what he does and doesn’t like to eat. I let the children create these pictures with no input from me but as I went around each child they were telling me about the features their spider had and I was amazed to see the accuracy with which some of the children can now draw a spider or insect, it was great to see them transferring new
understandings.

Jessica
‘My spider has pedipalps and Fangs.’
‘It has 8 eyes, two of them are on the back.’
Jessica also has 2 body parts and the right number of legs coming off the Cephalothoraxes.

Jeherson
Jeherson has drawn a great insect for his spider to eat, it had 3 parts with the legs and wings coming off the thorax. Jeherson has shown a noticeable size difference between the spider and the insect, which is quite an interesting observation as
larger insects can be overcome by smaller spiders.

Taylor
Taylor pointed to the spiky pink triangle on the bottom of the spider and told me…
‘My spider has a spinneret, it can make webs’

Finn
Finn has obviously enjoyed catching bugs and has drawn his spider in a container.

Shawn
Shawn’s spider is dangling, it has two body parts and 8 legs.

Sabrina
Sabrina’s spider is using its silk to dangle an insect it caught.