Amazing Spiders

Through participation in Environmental Science programs with traveling teacher Barb Busack, Cuba-Rushford fourth grade students learned spiders are fascinating animals.  On this day, they studied the parts of a spider, as well as how it hunts and digests its prey; soup anyone?  They also studied the spiders’ amazing ability to make silk stronger than steel and style it into a variety of webs. Most importantly, they learned spiders are beneficial to our ecosystem, as they help control the insect population. 
 
A competition was held to see which students could use their newly gained knowledge of spiders and their amazing lives to answer assessment questions and unscramble facts about spiders’ benefits to man.  The first student who figured out the scrambled sentence won a spider web keychain.
 
The lesson concluded with the students making a pipe cleaner spider that can be hung outside.  Hopefully a real spider will come along and use the framework to make a web, thus reducing the amount of unwanted insects in our yards and proving that spiders are beneficial!

By Barb Busack, CA BOCES