Spider Activities The Very Busy Spider Sequencing & Retelling Spider Craft

“The Very Busy Spider" by Eric Carle, is one of my students' all-time favorite books that I read for our spider theme. It's perfect for practicing the “sequencing and retelling a story” standards.

With that in mind, I designed this quick, easy and fun spider “slider” craft, that will help your students retell the story in the proper order.

There are two slider options. A completed orb spider web, as well as a corner spider web with the very busy spider dangling as he weaves.

Children color the story characters on the “slider strip” then cut and glue it together.

As they pull on the end of the “slider” the various pictures go through the “web window”, so that children can take turns retelling the story to a partner or reading buddy, then take their spider slider home to share with their family, once again practicing these standards.

Storytelling sliders are also an easy & interesting way to assess comprehension.

I’ve included 2 “Let's sequence the story” worksheets for this, where students color and trim the picture “windows” then glue them in the correct order on the blank worksheet.

I introduce the lesson by reading ”The Very Busy Spider”, then share my completed "slider craftivity” with my students.

So that you can quickly and easily make an example, I’ve included a full-color slider pattern.

After I read the story, we retell the tale together using the picture prompts on my slider. I have them guess which character they think comes next before I pull the picture through the “window”.

Teacher Comments:

• "Great resource to use during my spider unit! Easy to put together and worked great with retelling."
• “One of my best buys on TPT - my preschoolers loved using this to tell the story all by themselves!”
• "I did this with Kinders and with the right amount of scaffolding it worked great! They loved that they could take something from the book home with them."

I’ve also included a “Here’s What Happened…” writing prompt worksheet, as another way to check comprehension plus practice sequential writing, hopefully using a variety of ordinal numbers or other transitions.

For further sequencing fun, there's also a whole-group "Let's Sequence" game.

Extra Ideas from a teacher comment:

• "This resource was a great way to review the story, the characters and their sequence. Some of my students made headbands out of theirs while others used it as a timeline of events. It worked great to have students retell the story."

I’m Diane from Teach With Me, hoping your students enjoy storytelling sliders as much as mine do.

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