Subtraction Spiders

It was a great day for making connections in Mrs. Sarti's room yesterday :) I had planned out the entire subtraction spider activity but found myself getting a little tangled up (hardy har har). I started by drawing the spider's body and legs on the board, when I got to 5 legs the kids had figured out what I was drawing. When I stopped at 6, they were quick to point out that "spiders have 8 legs Mrs. Sarti, come on!" Oops!(Of course it registered once they pointed it out, don't judge) SO, in Ron Clark fashion I seized the opportunity to let them see me learn. I made a big production of Googling "spiders" and pronounced that in fact, they were right! "Wow, I get to teach you every day and today you taught me!" They were beside themselves and it was really cute (andIstillfeltdumb).


We continued on by discussing subtraction vocabulary and filled in our spider "bubble map" on the board. Each leg was a different subtraction vocabulary word.

After we brainstormed the kids began to construct their spiders. This was a good chance for me to assess their direction following abilities. I gave them the bodies and 2 legs at a time, this kept them from getting lost/confused/overwhelmed. Weeeell, since I "miscalculated" the number of legs, I didn't have enough, so I had the kids help me use math to figure out how many more legs to cut. Since we already had 6 we needed to find out how many more we needed if everyone should have 8. 8-6=2. So we needed 2 more for 20 kids, we went around and counted by two's until we figured out how many to make in all. Then I showed them how I figured that you could get 6 legs out of a sheet and I counted by sixes to find out how many sheets to cut :) Gotta take advantage of every opportunity!

The spiders turned out great and the kids had fun being crafty for a change.

We also did some pumpkin activities which we'll wrap up tomorrow in an attempt to distract them from the pre-Halloween no costumes or candy allowed at school craziness.