Fine Motor Fun Spider Craft

For our letter of the week, we are doing S is for Spider. With this activity, I'm incorporating counting (to number eight), patterning, and fine motor skills. The supplies we used include:

• black fuzzy sticks (pipe cleaners)
• 8 googly eyes
• liquid glue (non-toxic)
• colored straws (we used orange and purple) I found ours at the dollar store.
• hole punch or scissors
• plastic or paper bowl for the body (I used a cleaned take-out container.  You can use a paper plate or bowl and paint it black first.)

Here's how we played, learned, and made this spider craft.

First, I set up the activity by punching eight holes in the plastic bowl where I wanted the spider legs to be. Then I threaded a black fuzzy stick through each hole and twisted the end together to keep it in place. I also cut up five orange and five purple straws and placed the pieces into separate cups.

I demonstrated threading the fuzzy stick with one straw piece.  Then Pooky took over.  (I chose for us to work with two colors because I wanted Pook to work on simple patterning. Depending on the developmental readiness of your child, you could use all one color and skip the patterning skill, or you could use several colors for more complex patterning.

I chose to focus on the number eight with this craft since spiders have eight legs and eight eyes (most of them anyway). So once Pooky threaded eight straw pieces on the fuzzy stick, we stopped and counted them together.  Then I twisted up the end so the pieces wouldn't slip off.

We only got halfway through with the straw threading before Pook ran out of stamina and wandered away from the project.  We did some more threading, patterning, and counting over the next couple of days.

Then, on another day, we got set up for the final part; the gluing.

We started by counting all the straw pieces again (1-8).

Then Pooky counted out eight googly eyes.

I cut out a foam number eight and asked Pooky to use a cotton swab to add glue to it.

Then she used a similar method to glue on the googly eyes. (Once the glue dried it didn't look so messy.)

There you have it! A fun fine motor counting activity built into a spooky spider craft.

If you like kids activities that use recycled materials, check out this counting activity.

Or maybe you prefer pumpkin counting activities instead of spiders. Try this one.

You can get ideas for all kinds of fun activities from my Fall Activities for Kids board on Pinterest.