When we first started homeschooling Pink, I would do all my planning, printing, filing while the kids where sleeping.  It is much quicker and easier this way however I no longer tend to do that, crazy yes I know.  But my reason is – whenever I am printing off pages or doing some planning my daughter likes to join in.  She comes and sits with me at our kitchen table and she comments and tells me what she thinks.  And sometimes I will get a “Really mom I am not sure about that” but I also get the “ooh that looks exciting” or “Ooh we should be doing more of those pages” and sometimes ” mom can I try that now”.

Over the weekend I was planning some Maths pages and I had some Number bonds printed out.  I was not planning on doing them for some time but I had seen them and printed them to file away.  Pink saw them and immediately wanted to try to match the spiders to the spiderwebs.  Even though we have not done Number bonds to 20 yet I was happy to let her have a go.  I was very chuffed that she got some beads out and used them to help work out what the answers would be.  She selected 20 beads from her number tub. Then she put the number of beads that matched the number on the web to one side and would then look for the spider with the remaining number on.  I left her to do this and she worked out the answer for all the spiders by herself.

These lovely spider number bond pages are FREE to download on Twinkl they have them for Number bonds to 20 and Number bonds to 10. (REVISION : Since writing this post these spiders are now part of the Gold package on Twinkl)

Since she enjoyed the spider Maths so much we decided to make our own spiders (I was saving the spider number bonds and spider craft for when she studied mini beasts but guess I will just have to find something else).  We started off by getting some of our old plastic Easter eggs (we bought our eggs off Amazon about 2 years ago and we have used them for lots of activities).

We stuck pipe cleaners and a piece of string inside the eggs and then we closed the two halves (we had to use some sellotape to make sure it was properly shut).  The kids used some stickers for their eyes and Blue used stickers to decorate his spider.  Blue also used wool for his spiders legs – but I must be honest I thought the pipe cleaners worked better.

The string allows the kids to hang the spiders.  The first spider that we made did not have any string and Blue got very frustrated as he really wanted to hang the spider on the back of his chair.  We also found that adding some beans to the eggs before you sealed the eggs gave it a nice sound – Blue also really liked that.

And since we where making spiders we could not resist making some with our Pom Poms and pipe cleaners.  We have done this numerous times before but both kids still enjoy making them.

We inserted one long pipe cleaner through the pom pom which gave the spider one leg on either side.

We then attached a 2nd leg by using a pipe cleaner that was cut into half (the white leg).

We then wrapped the green pipe cleaner around the 1st  and 2nd legs which also gave us the 3rd and 4th leg on either side.

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