Our Fabulous Spider Art Exhibition

On Thursday evening March 25 we had a great Spider exhibition to show off all the lovely work the children had created over the past weeks.

It was a special day for Lorraine too - HER BIRTHDAY!!!

The art works looked SO colourful and gorgeous hanging together!

Emiliy, our student teacher made a spider cake for us!

Cory from Auckland University, came to film the inspiring art works for the DVD being made on EC visual art.

Watch this spider movie!

One day we noticed a bee fly into the big web by our tree. When he realised he was stuck he wriggled and jiggled until suddenly a large black spider dropped down from he branch above and started to wrap the bee in his silken thread. As we watched the spider then pulled the bee up, up, up back to his hiding place under the leaf. As we watched he started to EAT the bee!!!

It was such an exciting thing to watch! Thank you spider!!!

Our Spider Tree

One day, Jaime our student teacher, brought in some of the jewelry that she had made, to show us.

Some of the children were very intrigued and went on to make spider scultures.

They are hanging in our tree where a real spider has a huge web!

Auckland University comes to film

The spider painting process was so interesting that some people from Auckland University,who were making a DVD on children's art came to the centre to film the children making their spider paintings.

Our Spider paintings

We decided that our spider drawings looked so good that we would start to paint them.

At group times we discussed the different habitats that spiders like to build their webs in.

The children then painted a habitat onto an underpainted piece of paper.

Max's fence

When the habitats were dry a spider web was drawn onto it with silver or gold pen.

Now the children are screenprinting spiders on top of the spiderwebs .

These will be in our Spider Art Exhibition on Thursday 25 March at Kindy.

Clay Spiders

Making clay spiders takes lots of concentration!

Spiders at Kindy

It all started when Phoebe brought in a picture of a spider that she had drawn at home. Then she brought in her Spider book AARGH!

Then other children started drawing spiders, bringing in spider books and it took off!

Spiders....here we come!

We got out our black spiders and put them on the table to do observational drawings.

We started learning all sorts of interesting things about spiders as well from the books that we collected.

Our Korowai

This is our new Korowai (cloak) that we have made to greet and farewell staff, student teachers and children going to school.

To find out about korowai a small group of children went to the Auckland museum to see what was on display.

We gave the children a camera each and they took the photos . It was the first time we had been on a trip without adults taking photos to record the event!

Their photos were great.

We used our kindy korowai for the first time when Jaime and Pea joined us as student teachers on practicum.

Millie wore the cloak and shook their hands and Eashaan greeted them and introduced the song we wanted to sing to them.

Jaime and Pea said they felt very welcomed so we knew it had been a good thing to develop!