You can create spider glyphs to show students how these pictorial representations display information. Print out pictures of black line spiders and create a key that displays information for students to use to color in the spiders. For example, the key may instruct kids to color the body of the spider black if they like Halloween or purple if they don't, and to color the legs orange if they like spiders and yellow if they don't. Have kids use the keys to color in their spiders and display the colored spiders in the classroom.
Spiders can be used to introduce your students to fractions. Provide children with piles of different colored spider stickers or toy spiders. The children can count the total amount of spiders and you can explain to them that this number represents the denominator in a fraction problem. The kids can then count the total number of a specific color of spiders. Inform them that this number represents the numerator. For example, if there are 10 spiders and three of them are purple, the fraction of spiders that are purple would be 3/10.
You can do a lesson to reinforce one-to-one correspondence with spiders and webs. Pictures of spider webs can be drawn and in the center of each one, write a number. Draw pictures of spiders and on the back of each spider, write a number of dots that corresponds to the numbers written on the webs. The spiders are cut out and you can instruct the children to place the correct spider on the correct web. For instance, children can place a spider with five dots on its back on the web that has the number five printed on it.
You can also use spiders to teach your students how to order numbers. Print out or draw pictures of spiders and write numbers on their backs. The spiders are placed in a pile and the children are asked to arrange the spiders in sequential order. You can use the spiders to teach counting by ones, or skip-counting using variables such as twos, fives and tens. In addition to teaching children how to count in sequential order, this activity also lays the foundation of multiplication skills, as children learn how to count by specific groups of numbers.