🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🏆 Pride & Accomplishment — Completing a craft and displaying or giving it away gives children a concrete experience of accomplishment — building the relationship between effort, completion, and pride that motivates future creative risk-taking.
- ♻️ Environmental Thinking — Using natural or recycled materials in crafts begins to develop awareness that materials have a life beyond their original use — an early foundation for environmental stewardship and sustainable thinking.
- 👁️ Hand-Eye Coordination — Guiding scissors along a line, placing stickers exactly, and painting within a space all require the visual-motor integration that handwriting, sports, and detailed work depend on.
- 📋 Planning & Sequencing — Multi-step craft projects require children to think about what comes first, next, and last — building the procedural sequencing skills that underlie reading comprehension, mathematics, and everyday problem solving.
This preschool Halloween craft is so simple and inexpensive to make, you can invite the entire family. The Friendly Black Spider Preschool Halloween Craft can be hung in your window or over a door to greet trick-or-treaters, but it is equally fun to hang anywhere in the house for a spooktacular Halloween decoration.
Materials You Will Need
Two sturdy black paper plates, black on both sides
8 black chenille sticks
Black construction paper
A small piece of red yarn
Two 3 mm green pompoms or any color you like
Craft glue
Hole punch
Marking pen
Long String
How to Make It
Step 1:
Glue the two plates together, face to face, with the bottoms on the outside. Choose one side to be the face.
Step 2:
Trace a circle the right size to be a face on the black construction paper; cut it out.
Step 3:
Glue the construction paper circle onto the lower part of the front plate to be the spiders face because spiders hang upside down.
Step 4:
Glue the two pompoms on the face to be the spider’s eyes. Draw a nice smile on her face or cut a bit of red yarn and curve it into a smile and glue it on.
Step 5:
Punch one hole for hanging at the top of the spider, the opposite side of the plates from her head.
Step 6:
Punch four evenly spaced holes on the left side of the plate then punch four more to match on the right side.
Step 7:
Poke a chenille stick through each of the holes to be legs. Wrap the end of the chenille stick around the edge of the plate to secure. Bend the legs at a right angle to look like knees.
Step 8:
Tie the string through the hole in the top and hang anywhere appropriate.
Helpful Tips for Parents
Tip 1:
If you can’t find black paper plates, use white ones and paint or color them black.
Tip 2:
You might want to enforce the edges of the plates with invisible tape before you punch the holes to help prevent tearing. Cover enough area with tape so that the hole will be punched in the middle of the tape.
I'm
Margaret Studer, the Preschool Crafts writer for PreschoolRock.com. In addition to crafts, I enjoy writing, children, cooking, and cats. I love to hear from my readers, so please share your preschool craft ideas with me. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or questions about this site, please
contact me.
Establish a rotating gallery system: a designated wall space with clips, a clothesline, or frames with removable backs where new work regularly replaces old. Photograph all work before rotating it out — a digital photo album of a year's artwork shows remarkable development and stores without physical space. Send particularly meaningful work to grandparents and relatives, who often display it prominently. The key principle: everything gets acknowledged and displayed briefly; the best pieces are kept for longer; photographs preserve everything.
Clear bins or drawers labeled with pictures and words at child height allow preschoolers to access and return supplies independently. Separate categories: drawing materials, painting materials, cutting/gluing materials, three-dimensional materials. The best storage makes the child both able to get supplies without help and responsible for returning them after use. Inaccessible supplies require adult mediation for every craft session — this friction significantly reduces the frequency of child-initiated making.
