Spiders!

I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to ever be fascinated by the mere supernatural. ~Joseph Conrad

During these weeks leading up to Halloween, whether the kids know it or not, pretty much all of our art projects are designed to feed into the higher purpose of decorating the classroom for our Halloween party. A couple days ago, I showed you our "woven bulletin board" in progress. Here's one we've finished.

For whatever reason we've had an extra spider-y fall this year so the arachnids are top of mind these days. I was quite gratified when we made our spider webs using pie pans . . .

. . . rounds of black construction paper, and rolling marbles around in white paint, that most of the kids automatically glued their plastic spiders in the center of their webs, just the way we've observed the dozens of orb spiders do it around our outdoor classroom.

In years past, when we haven't had the opportunity to do as much first hand observation of spiders, the kid's webs have often been populated by dozens of spiders. This year, I don't think we wound up with a single web with more than one. The idea of one spider per web isn't something I've ever discussed with the children -- it seems it's something they now just know, just the way they now seem to know that orb spiders like to sit in the middle of their webs.

We then made the project bigger and more communal for outdoors, lining some of the boxes left over from our new cubbies with black paper, then using golf balls instead of marbles.

Put them all together and, voila, party decorations!

To which I added the Joseph Conrad quote for the benefit of the adults who will be in attendance.

Interestingly, this has been up for several days. The kids in the 3-5 class, the ones who made it, haven't seemed to even notice it, whereas their counterparts in the Pre-3 class have been standing before it as if in awe, pointing and saying, "Spiders!"