Spider Web Color Wheel Craft & The Rainbow Web Book
This month’s theme for our Bookspiration Club is Spiders. Creepy as they are, they play an important part of our everyday world. To make learning about them a bit less creepy, we decided to incorporate a creative Spider Web Color Wheel Craft. Not only did the kids learn about the difference between spider and insects and the life cycle of a spider, they also learned about primary, secondary, and tertiary colors + how to make them!
We are also sharing about the book, The Rainbow Web which also happens to have a huge resource of lessons and printables.
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The Rainbow Web by Cheryl Block
“The story captures a child’s imagination and curiosity about spiders and rainbows” [from Amazon]. Little spider discovers that by eating berries, he can spin his own rainbow! Kids will learn about being themselves, how spider webs work, colors, and more. The illustrations are in black and white, and then the colors of the rainbow are added in one at a time.
Ages: 4-8
Spider Web Color Wheel Craft
Supplies Needed:
- paper plate
- pencil
- watercolors (we use these)
- paintbrush
- glue
- glitter
Instructions:
Place a dot in the center of the paper plate to guide the lines you will be making. Start by drawing a line in the middle both horizontally and vertically. You should now have 4 equal triangles.
In each of those 4 sections, draw 2 more lines of equal distance (1 big triangle now equals 3 pie slice shapes). You will have 12 sections total.
Mixing Colors Learning Activity
This turned out to be a great way to learn about the color wheel for my 7 year old and a fun way for my 4 year old to learn about how to make colors by mixing. I ask Big Brother what the primary colors are and then placed a dab of blue, red, and yellow on a plate/palette, slightly watered down.
→ Here is a great example of a color wheel with the 12 colors and an explanation.
Next, we did the secondary colors. I asked Little Sister how to make orange, green, and purple. Then we painted the pie slice in the middle of the 2 colors – for example, we painted the middle section between red and yellow with orange by mixing the red and yellow paint together on the plate/palette.
Big Brother pointed to the green watercolor tube and said that there was green right there. LOL! I told him that the point was to learn about color mixing – we painted 12 colors total using only the 3 primary colors.
He also learned what the tertiary colors are: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet. These are made by mixing a primary color with a secondary color. The name always starts with the primary color (example: blue-green instead of green-blue). Blue-green would be placed in the section of the plate between the blue and the green.
They loved learning how to make this basic color wheel! After it dried, I made a spider web outline with glue. To do this, place glue on the lines that separate the colors and the make wide ‘U’ lines connecting these. The kids then had a blast shaking glitter over the glue. Both were excited about how their glittery spider web color wheel looked!
More Activities for The Rainbow Web
This book comes with a cd-rom filled with learning activities! There are also many activities to print via their website as well as suggested lessons.
Printable Activities:
Activities included on the Rainbow Web CD-ROM (with downloadable samples!)
Downloadable Lessons & Activities
We printed the mini spider book, life cycle of a spider, and the build-a-spider activities. The build-a-spider is a great way for kids to learn about the difference between spiders and insects. As they are building their spider using the chosen pieces, ask how many legs a spider has and then point out the insects have six (other differences: 2 body segments instead of 3 and have no wings or antennae).
More Book-inspired Spider Crafts and Activities
- Fiction and Non-fiction Book Suggestions – Free Printable Spider Coloring & Activity Book + more!
- Eensy Weensy Spider Freaks Out (Big Time) – Itsy Bitsy Spider Activities
- The Very Busy Spider Craft + more Spider Activities!
- Aaaarrgghh! Spider! – Glittery Spider Webs
- Diary of a Spider – Silly Spider Craft
- Miss Spider’s Tea Party – Simple Spider Math Activity
From our Archives:
- Watercolor/Glue Resist Web and Handprint Spider
- Not-so-scary Pom Pom Spiders
- Spider Web Number Lacing Craft
- Free Printable Spider Web Templates
- Bug/Insect Crafts & Entomophagy + EEKologist website
If you make a spider web color wheel craft of your own, we would love to see it! Share it on our FB page or tag us on IG (artsymomma_amanda)!
Wow, these are beautiful. I love colour wheels and the gold glitter just makes them stand out. perfect
Beautiful! This will go along wonderfully with our spider web crafts tomorrow! Thanks so much for sharing at the A Little Bird Told Me Linkup.
Love this creative spin on the color wheel! Never heard of that book; I’ll have to see if our library has it!
So cute and clever! Thank you for sharing at Merry Monday!
Wow! This is an amazing idea on how to teach the kids primary and secondary colours!!! Mine keep asking about it so I’ll be CERTAIN to share this with them!! Wow! What a great looking spider web!
Thanks so much Jeanine!