This is a basic lesson plan for mostly teachers and librarians, but I think parents might enjoy some of these ideas as well.

About Me

I taught 2nd grade at a public elementary school in IL, now I'm a children's librarian at a public library, and working towards becoming a media specialist to work in a public school LRC (Learning Resource Center).

Most of what you see here will be activities that I've run personally for kids either in a school or in a library story time. My hope is that these things will work for you too in getting kids motivated and into reading!

Book Activities

This is from a 5-part summer library story hour that I ran, centered around on Eric Carle's books. He's mostly famous for his illustrations, but he soon began writing all his own stories as well.

Book: The Very Busy Spider; written and illustrated by Eric Carle

Focus: Spiders

Time: 45-60 min.

Lesson:

• Table: Set out cold, cooked spaghetti for kids to feel and play with. (Lay out plastic spider rings, if you have them.)
  
• Sing: "The Eensy Weensy Spider"
  
• Read: The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle (Available for a great price on Amazon.com, or I would advise ordering it through Inter-library Loan from your local or school library, if it's not there on the shelf.)
• Ask Higher-Order Question: Why do spiders make webs?
• Ask Connection Question: What do you like to build?
  
• Ask Connection Question: What are some other things that you like to spend your time doing?
• Activity: Have a ball of yarn, ready to unravel. Tell the kids to sit down in a circle. Tell them that they are about to make a spider web from yarn. Have them toss the yarn ball around to whoever they want, holding onto their piece of string each time they toss it. If the ball is small enough, let them do this until the ball is gone; and of course, make sure everyone gets a turn. By the end, there should be one big web of yarn!
• Watch: YouTube Videos showing real spiders weaving their webs. I can't guarantee that these links will always work, but I used these 2: SpiderVideo1 and SpiderVideo2
• (If they're mostly 3-4 year-olds, they may only be interested in seeing ONE video clip, or just PARTS of them.  They can seem a little long.  Watch them until you see their interest dropping--for example: fidgeting or talking.)

• Art/Snack: Give each child a paper plate with some cooked spaghetti on it (NOT from the table!)  and a black piece of construction paper. They can eat their own spaghetti as they lay down the spaghetti one-by-one onto the paper, making their own spider webs.  Wet spaghetti sticks surprisingly well onto paper (No GLUE needed), although, it will eventually dry out on their papers and get hard.

• Free Reading: At this time, I allowed those in the library to browse through all the Eric Carle books that I had gathered through Inter-library loan and put into bins for easy grabbing.  They were free to choose and read the books that looked the most interesting.
• Parting Gift: (If you have them, give out spider gummy candies as the children leave.  I found these from the Halloween aisle of a store)
• Clean-up: The table of spaghetti can become a bit of a mess!  First I gathered as much of it as I could and tossed it.  Then, for the tougher parts, I added water to the table, and that loosened up the sticky parts that weren't coming up earlier.

Materials:

• The book: The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle
• The song: The Eensy Weensy Spider (available here)
  
• 2 bowls of cooked spaghetti (I cooked it all right before and then quickly cooled it all with cold water)  One bowl is for feeling at the table.  The other bowl is for eating/making spider webs on paper.  For 16 kids, I cooked up one regular box of spaghetti and that was enough for both bowls.
  
• black construction paper (1 per child)
• ball of yarn (ready to be unraveled)
• (optional - plastic spider rings)
• (optional - spider gummy candies)

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