The Itsy Bitsy Spider is a song that most of us in early childhood education or at home are familiar with and at some point in the school year, I almost always spend time singing the song and reading one or more versions of an Itsy Bitsy Spider book. Because my students are usually already familiar with the song, we spent lots of time expanding on the song in different ways…
After singing several different versions of the song such as “the teeny tiny spider” using our teeny tiny voices and “the big gigantic spider” using our loud monster voices, our Pre-K class explored the Itsy Bitsy Spider by making an itsy bitsy play about the spider. We began by talking about four key words in our song: spout, rain, sun, and spider…
I asked the children if they could tell me what a waterspout was and most of them suggested it was a spout like we have on our sink but since it doesn’t rain inside, we needed to find a spout that was outdoors so we went outside to examine the waterspouts we could find…
Now that we had an idea of what a waterspout might look like for our play, we were ready to begin making our props for our itsy bitsy play. Â We started by making rain. The children decided we could cut blue paper to make our raindrops…
And we collected the blue raindrops in our prop box to save them for our play…
Once the children felt we had enough raindrops, then we moved on to making a waterspout. Â It was suggested that we could make a spout by rolling up paper or using our white tubes (that we collect from Walgreens). After a quick vote, we decided to connect the white tubes together using tape…
We had to move the tube to the floor and finish it because the children wanted the waterspout to be tall…
I asked the children if they would like to paint the waterspout but the children decided to use markers to decorate the waterspout instead…
Next, we needed a big sun. The children suggested we could use yellow paper but in my closet, we found a yellow piece of poster board and decided it would be perfect. Â The children decided that the sun needed to start with a large circle and have lots of rays so off they went to finish our sun…
And now that we had three of our four props, it was time to make a big spider which we made from black pipe cleaners and added a string to pull the spider up and down the spout…
Our props were all ready to go so now we were ready to practice our play so that we could present it to our preschool class the next day…
But then we decided that one more detail was yet to be added. We needed a curtain for our play so I grabbed an old sheet and the children made their very own curtain…
The children decorated the curtain by covering the sheet with dots using our dot markers which the children had been using earlier over in our art center…
Covering the curtain with lots of dots was lots of fun! Now, we were ready for our play! Whew!  An amazing collaborative effort for our itsy bitsy play…
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