Do you follow Kids Activities Blog?  Holly Homer and Rachel Miller have created a one stop shop of art and craft activities for kids plus tons of parent info, suggestions and more. A few months ago they launched a fantastic book called 10 Kids Activities – That are the Bestest, Funnest Ever!  I was lucky to receive a copy of the book and have been paroosing all the great activities for months.  The one I kept going back to was grape sculptures made from grapes and toothpicks.  I was surprised I had never done any building like this with my kids before.  With Halloween around the corner I decided to change it up a bit and make it a marshmallow and toothpick spider web.  Thanks for the inspiration Kids Activities Blog! This was so much fun.

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We started with an invitation to paint.  I set up toothpicks, black biocolor paint (it’s a little thicker than regular tempera paint but tempera paint would work too) and some paint brushes.  No special reason to cover the table with tin foil besides that it looked cool.  The girls began by delicately painting individual toothpicks with classical music playing in the background.  Ahh, so peaceful.

I’d say within about four seconds, this is how they painted the toothpicks : ) Oh well.

We let them dry overnight and the next day I set up marshmallows, black toothpicks and some creepy Halloween candy on a tray.

D licked every piece of candy and then rejected all of them and Gigi shoved 5 marshmallows in her mouth one after the other.  Oh, to be young.  Then they tried building and loved it.  Well, Gigi loved it.  D was a little young for this but she loved playing with the spider I made her.

It looked like so much fun I decided to give it a try myself.  Turns out this is a really awesome math and science activity in addition to being really fun.  Look at all the shapes we noticed in the spider web.  We also had a chance to talk about spiders, how many legs they have (not six by the way like you see in the pics. Oops.  Mommy was corrected quickly) and how they spin webs.

I love all this creepy candy we put in the web for our spider to eat.  Blechhh.

To make the spider we stuck four toothpicks through a marshmallow and glued googley eyes on top for the eyes.

There are a ton of great activities in this book.  There are 101 actually : )  I highly recommend it.  Gigi looks through it all the time when we are in need of a fun activity.  You can buy it here.  Thanks Kids Activities Blog! Looking forward to our next project from your awesome book! Happy Halloween everyone!