JNW’s Halloween Challenge: Spiders (Jennifer Nichole Wells)

My preschool students made these stained glass spiders one year.  The kids in my class were between 18 months and 4 years.  I cut the spiders for the little kids, but the rest they all did themselves.  I gave them each a square of contact paper and put out tissues squares of different Halloween colors.  Purple seemed to be the most popular color.  They had fun filling their squares and when I put them up in the window, they loved how the sun made them so bright and “spooky”.  During circle time, we talked about what they were afraid of and we all agreed, myself included, that spiders are just creepy.

Insects and spiders never really bugged me until I moved to Australia when I was 5.  The first house we lived in there had a roof that extended out aways from the the front door providing an area for shade out front.  Every night, really large spiders would build their webs between the roof extension and the ground.  There had to be at least 10 to 15 spider webs with spiders dead center when we would open the front door in the morning as we headed out to school.  I refused to got out the door with them all like that.  There was no way to get out without having to go through more than one web.  My Mom would bravely take a broom and swing it about breaking all the webs then sweeping away the spiders that  had dropped.  I still get the heebee geebees just thinking about it.  I really, really don’t like spiders, but they do intrigue me.  I like watching them build their webs or catching their food.  I just don’t like them in my house crawling about.  EEEEK!!!  Being a Preschool teacher meant that I had to be the adult and deal with the creepy crawlies that came into the classroom or that we encountered out on the playground.   Thank goodness it didn’t happen too often.