Preschool Spider Snack that also Strengthens Counting Skills

 Inside: Work on simple counting skills while making this fun and easy preschool spider snack. Comes with a free printable sheet!

Note: This activity was done with preschoolers when I taught 3 and 4 year olds.

We just wrapped up our spider unit and had a blast!

We made spin art spiders, sang spider songs, read spider books, and loved having pretend spiders in our water table.

But the highlight (and grand finale) was making edible spiders. I wanted to add some counting to all the other fun spider activities we were enjoying. So I put together a fun spider snack with free printable activity sheet.

I love adding math where ever I can to strengthen number recognition and counting skills. But I also want to keep it hands-on and playful. So I put together a printable that our preschoolers used while building their edible spiders. They had to put a lot of thought into how many of each ingredient they were using, counting along the way.

The end result was getting to taste their yummy creations. Our question of the day was “What was your favorite part of the spider snack?” and almost everyone’s answer was “All of it!”

Use the free printable and invite your preschoolers to build their own spider snack! Scroll down to find the download link.

If you are interested in making this spider snack with your preschoolers, you don’t have to use the exact ingredients that we used. Just be mindful of the shapes that are on the printable.

What we used:

• Vanilla wafer cookies
• Pretzel sticks
• Mini chocolate chips
• A tube of squeezable icing

All week we’ve been talking about how many legs and eyes spiders have, so our preschoolers were excited to add them to this snack.

We started with the body.

After placing 8 mini-chocolate chips on the dots for eyes, it was time to assemble our spider. We squirted icing around the cooking and on top.

We counted the pretzel rods as we placed them around the cookie.

We then added the eyes.