Last week, on a particularly foggy morning, we went spider web hunting in the garden. I love how the webs appear bejeweled as the dew clings to them.
Related: I promised my daughter a few weeks ago that we could have craft day on Saturdays. This was in an effort to stamp out channel her creativity through the rest of the week, as she often overwhelms me with her project ideas that never really take into account planning or materials (or the fact that I really just want to be lying down at any given moment). So yesterday I surprised the children with wire snowflake forms, plates of clear glass beads, wire and Vince Guaraldi on ITunes. My plan was to create beaded spider webs.
My children really had no interest in making clear beaded spider webs. They wanted color and lots of it. So I decided to let them express themselves instead of making it a Martha Stewart sweat shop sort of afternoon. They actually came up with some really cool patterns and even the baby my 5 year old was able to handle the tiny beads and wires without a problem. He occasionally handled the wires awfully close to my eyeballs so goggles wouldn't be a bad thing to add to the materials list.
I call this a huge success despite the results being far different from my expectations because it kept the children occupied and happy for hours.
We didn't really follow instructions, but there are some available here. If you do this I strongly suggest making a rule that no one is allowed to become frustrated when all their beads fall off their wire because this happened to us a lot. No one lost their temper because I told them they couldn't (even me!)





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