Spider in the waterspout aka the modern Sisyphus

One of our favourite nursery rhymes is the Incy Wincy Spider, which is like a modern Greek Tragedy (reflects the absurdity of human life).

The plot is simple: there is this poor spider he goes up the water spout then comes the rain and washes the spider out then out comes the sunshine and dries up the rain and the spider goes up the spout again and it goes on and on and on… so that is why it reminds me of the story of Sisyphus who had to roll his great big rock up the hill then when he reached the summit it fell back again and he had to start it all over again.

The Spider fingerplay was one of the few rhymes I got familiar with when we started our bilingual journey I sang and fingerplayed it for my son god knows how many times and he loved it and he loves it still. But now we started acting out songs, we started using more props and started to have more fun with the nursery rhymes. One reason for this is probably the fact that we sang it over and over again, so it was getting a bit boring.

This time the fun factor is the use of proper props, I bought a waterspout in Praktiker for a couple of hundreds forint and bought the spider in a second hand shop along with the sun (which is a flower really, but it does its job as the Sun too) and made the representation of the rain as a little DIY.

It is a fun game to play, the little one knows now the words as well (he is now 21 Months old) so we sing it together and play it together sometimes we manage to engage daddy as well for a while with it.

It introduces the concepts of sun and rain, two directions up and down and it is very funny and easy to act out.

If you have a tunnel children can go through the tunnel and pretend to be an incy wincy spider, we use little blue balls to represent the raindrops so children can act out the whole drama J

CAST: IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE