Spiders and Grandads
I've got my eight year old grandson staying with us for about a week. We had a moment as I was putting him to bed and debriefing the day with him. We reflected on the day and recalled the drive to Carpenter Rocks where he handled a small rock crab and jumped a crevice. The crab resembled a spider and he clung to the other side of the crevice like a spider.
So the question arose “How do spiders climb walls?” to which I asked “How do you think we could find out?”. “Perhaps we could make that a goal for tomorrow I suggested.”
His suggestion is that we “collect a spider” in a bottle and examine it.
That's a good idea but I wonder if “anyone else has found this out already”. “Shall we check it out on the internet?” “Do you know about the internet?”
Yea, there is “games.com.”
So, like a good Grandad I've done my homework and am now well prepared for tomorrows investigation.
http://www.spiders.com/info/faqs.jsp#faq32
Well for anyone who wants to find out about spiders then this is the place. Fantastic.
Makes being a good Grandad easy :-)
posted by Wara @ 9:03 pm
4 Comments:
At 6:43 am,
Jason Plunkett said…
You would make a good advertisement for Bigpond.
Collecting a spider in a jar (bug catcher) and examining it may not necessarily lead to an answer. But it was a good starting point. I would have thought it would have been a good educational experience. Then with the knowledge that you had discovered on the Internet you could have both observed and compared the spider’s actions. Maybe even placed a vertical piece of timber in the jar as a comparison to the glass wall….
At 6:50 am,
Wara said…
Hopefully that is the way that the day will unfold.
At 9:21 am,
Jason Plunkett said…
Well did it?
At 2:10 pm,
Wara said…
Well kind of. When we talked about it the next day he reckoned that Grandad was going to find out on the internet and if that didn't help we were going to catch spiders.
So I got a torch and a good magnifying glass. I shone the torch along the wall so that the tiny little humps and bumps would be emphasised and asked him what he saw.
He saw humps and bumps that a spider might be able to grip on as he gripped onto the other side of the crevice.
He then went a bragged to his auntie about what he had discovered.
Certainly a collapsed version of my original thoughts but very successful in my mind (and his).
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