Spider Cooking -
Spider Cookies
Another recipe to use in the classroom to teach kids about the spider's parts, kindly
sent in by Peg Powell from Concord in California.
To start, give each child a plastic sandwich bag filled with the following
spider parts: " a napkin, 2 chocolate sandwich cookies, 4 pieces of thin red
licorice, 2 Chinese noodles, 8 round cake decoration candies, and 6 shelled sunflower
seeds. Then read these directions aloud:
 1. Place the two cookies
side by side on your napkin. A spider has 2 body parts. The front part is called the
cephalothorax. The back is called the abdomen. The cephalothorax is like the head and
chest of the spider. It contains its brain and stomach.
2. Carefully open the cephalothorax and lay each piece of licorice across the
middle of the cookie. Put the top back on the cookie. A spider's legs grow out from the
front part of its body. Your spider should have 4 licorice legs on each side. How many
legs do spiders have in all? Spider legs are covered with tiny hairs. It can smell and
feel vibrations with these hair. Spiders also have two tiny claws on the end of each leg
which help it cling to its web. If a leg is lost, a spider grows a new one!
3. Many spiders have 8 eyes. Lay your tiny candies on the cephalothorax in two
rows with 4 in each row. Even with all those eyes, most spiders do not have good eyesight.
How can a spider know when an insect is caught in her web? ( It feels the vibrations with
its legs).
 4. In
the front of a spider's body are its jaws and fangs. Stick 2 noodles into the filling of
the cookie so they stick out under its eyes. Its jaws are very strong and its fangs sharp
and poisonous. When a spider catches an insect, it use its fangs in two ways. First, it
injects its prey with poison to paralyze it. Then, because spiders can only digest
liquids, it injects the insect with digestive fluids that turn its insides into bug soup.
The spider then sucks up the meal. It leaves the crunchy outside of the insect for another
animal to enjoy.
5. Open your spider's abdomen. This part contains the heart and lungs. In the
back of the abdomen are 6 tiny spinnerets -tubes that release thin threads of silk to make
a web or an egg sack. Place 6 sunflower seeds inside the back part of the spider's body to
remind you of the spinnerets.
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