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By Kim Vij 3 Comments

Spider Meatballs: Little Hands that Cook with Books

Create a spider themed snack with your kids with our spider meatballs! With just a few ingredients you can sneak in some veggies for some a spider themed meatball snack!  Here’s how to make this spider snack.  

Spider Meatball Recipe for Kids to make for Halloween

It’s October and we’re getting into the Halloween spirit. We had fun this week making Spider Meatballs in cooking class. The girls really became interested in spiders as we were cooking. This lesson we focused on the mixing ingredients together. We discussed food safety with handling meat and the importance of washing hands when you touch uncooked meat.

They also got a chance to use my hand held grater to grate the carrots and zucchini for the meatballs. We talked about how some tools in the kitchen are just for grown up such as knives, peelers and graters. For the spider meatball recipe we focused on finding the word that matched the ingredients on our recipe. The girls were to find and label carrot, zucchini, meat, oil, parsley, pepper and garlic salt.

As we cooked we talked about how important it was to incorporate all the ingredients together. We also really focused on forming uniform meatballs so they would cook the same and what could happen if we didn’t.

If you’d like to try your own Spider Meatballs here’s the recipe.

Spider Meatballs Recipes for Kids

Ingredients for Spider Meatballs 

  • 1 lb ground meat
  • 1 small zucchini
  • 1 carrot
  • 1 Tb Olive Oil
  • 2 Tb parsley
  • ½ tsp garlic salt
  • ½ tsp pepper
  • chow mein noodles
  • sliced olives

Directions for Spider Meatballs 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

  1. Mix all ingredients together.
  2. Form into 12 meatballs.
  3. Bake for 25 minutes.
  4. Once cool enough to touch add spiders legs and spider eyes.
  5. Enjoy

While the spiders were cooking we read an adorable Sing and Read Story book The Itsy Bitsy Spider by Constanza Basaluzzo. This book by Basaluzzo has some adorable illustrations that I plan to inspire some artwork and story writing during the week for our afterschool express.

Image Detail

We sang some spider songs together before we began our cooking to get us in the spider mood. This one was a hit since we could change whatever bug the spider was eating. This was an easy and fun way to engage print into the song.

We also made our own spiders from foams balls, pom poms, googly eyes and black pipe cleaners.  The girls thought it could be something to add to our Halloween decorations.  Teacher Tip: It’s also a great character prompt for the girls to do some creative writing throughout October.

Check out how to make your very own web at Rainy Day Mum 

Like this idea? Pin for later or share now with a friend!

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Filed Under: Recipes, Science Tagged With: Fall, Kim, Little Hands That Cook, Spiders, VBC Summer Camp

About Kim Vij

Early childhood teacher, author, speaker and mom of 3. Kim shares ways to make learning fun and parenting an adventure by sharing developmentally appropriate activities.

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Comments

  1. Raising a Happy Child says

    October 12, 2011 at 11:17 pm

    I like your little trick of adding carrot and zucchini to meatballs. My daughter loves them, and I could snick some veggies in that way. What a fun idea to make spiders out of them!

    Reply
  2. Kim says

    October 14, 2011 at 10:28 am

    Thanks Raising a Happy Child! I'm trying to learn how to incoorperate more veggies into what we eat, somehow I just can't get enough into my kids.

    Reply
  3. DianeMargaret says

    September 21, 2012 at 10:47 am

    My husband, God bless him, tried to make something similar to this for our daughter! Things like this make me laugh AND think I should have made her a bag lunch before leaving!
    He got the idea from the "dog-a-pus" idea (pieces of hotdog with spaghetti shoved through to make legs). He couldn't find the hotdogs in the freezer but he DID find a package of meatballs.
    I guess nobody had ever told him how gross BOILED meatballs would be!!!

    Reply

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Kim Vij

Early childhood teacher, author, speaker and mom of 3. Kim Vij shares ways to make learning fun and parenting an adventure by sharing all kinds of easy kid crafts, activities and even recipes for kids!
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