Spider magazine is designed for the 6 to 9 set and is one of the family of magazines that also features Babybug, Ladybug and Cricket.
This series of magazines does well at covering its bases, meaning all of them stretch a bit into the next age group so that if a child is struggling a bit, or ahead of her age group, there’s always another magazine that can help them improve their reading skills.
Arriving once a month, Spider provides short stories, advice, poetry, crafts, guessing games, and more. It is an amusing, literate, gently multicultural publication that should appeal to even the most reluctant readers because of the humor and clever artwork.
A recent (May) issue offered six stories, from a story about Halloween costumes to a lovely piece about an eccentric grandmother who keeps animals in her house to an old tale about a woman who seeks advice from a rabbi. One piece focuses on the true story of a deaf woman, written by her granddaughter, and then moves into two pages of American Sign Language matching cards, teaching children such words as banana, spaghetti, tiger and guitar.
Work, of course, is blended into some of the projects and games included in the magazine, so that kids are asked to really think about how to rearrange letters to form new words, make crafts, answer questions and so on.
Answers are available for those stymied by the little quizzes, fortunately. Kids can also send in artwork or poems to be published.
But the magazine isn’t all work, by any means.
For your amusement, or at least, because I loved it, here is a poem from the May issue, written by Leslie D. Perkins:
The Llama and the aardvark
Went aambling by the llake;
The llama said, “I llove you
Aas much aas llemon cake.”
The llady aaarvark aanswered,
“I’ve lloved you aalll aalong,
Aas much aas llarks and llovebirds
Aadore aan Aapril song.”
The llama said, “How llovely!
“Llet’s never llive aapart.”
The aalways-aardent aardvark
Aagreed with aall her heart.
And llet me tell you, epinionators, allll those double lletters are reallllllllly hard to write.
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