Integrating Spiders into Your Curriculum

Often times I hear Texas teachers say, "I'd love to teach more thematically, but those things just aren't in our curriculum."  They are right. We don't have scarecrows, bats, or spiders.

But we do have Science standards and Reading standards that allow us to work in these FUN things!

The Reading TEKS are too many to list, but here are the Science TEKS!

We always begin with reading LOTS about our topic--in this case, Spiders!!! Depending on what we need to cover that week, we may read fiction or we may read nonfiction. If we read fiction during read aloud time, then we read nonfiction during our science time.  We use lots of graphic organizers and anchor charts to record our learning and thinking. 

We also use our Shared Reading time to integrate our little topic or theme. Sometimes this is tricky.  It's always easy to find a poem on the topic, but it's not always easy to find a poem that is on the topic AND meets the needs of the students.  I have to think, "Is this what my students truly need? Do they really need work on noticing how sentences begin and end? Do they really need work on phoneme substitution? Do they need more practice on finding sight words and reading them fluently?" It can be tough sometimes! I often times will just write my own poem! ;) 

Then during Science time we hit the Science standards and we ask questions, organize our findings, and tell about what we found through graphic organizers.

Spiders are a BLAST! My little friends always enjoy them! All of these activities and MORE can be found in my new Spider Science and Literacy unit! 

Click the image above to check it out!

Have a wonderful week!!