Spider crafts align with a "Little Miss Muffet" unit.
The nursery rhyme "Little Miss Muffet" by Dr. Thomas Muffet depicts his daughter, Patience, and her fear of spiders. Integrate the nursery rhyme adapted by Mother Goose into your lesson planning during a nursery rhyme theme unit or during a week-long unit on spiders. Devise activities for the students to enrich the "Little Miss Muffet" unit.
Story Reenactment
Punch or cut sixteen 1/4-inch slits approximately 3-inches inside the edge of a 16-inch circle of fabric. Weave yarn in and out of the holes and pull the yarn ends tight to create a bonnet shaped hat. Tie the yarn pieces into a bow around each preschooler's head to create a "Little Miss Muffet" hat. Allow each student a turn to sit on a footstool, or tuffet, and retell the story with the preschooler as the main character. Alternatively, students can use photocopied "Little Miss Muffet" images glued to the end of wooden craft sticks to recreate the story.
Edible Crafts
Recreate the "Little Miss Muffet" nursery rhyme with edible items for snack time. The Library Support website states that a tuffet is the term used to describe a grassy lump in the ground as well as a footstool. Lay a piece of clean lettuce in a paper bowl to represent a grassy tuffet and spoon a dollop of cottage cheese, resembling curds and whey, over it. Top the cottage cheese with a large raisin, which resembles a spider's dark-colored body. Another edible nursery rhyme idea from Craft Bits suggests that the students press strands of black licorice into the white filling of a chocolate sandwich cookie to create "Little Miss Muffet" spiders.
Whole Class Projects
Seat the preschool students in a circle and instruct one student to hold the end of a ball of yarn while tossing it to another student across the circle. The second student keeps hold of the yarn and tosses it to a different child. The process repeats until the center of the circle appears like a spider web. A second whole class activity involves decorating one corner of your classroom as a spider web by taping white yarn back and forth between the connecting walls. Students paint a foam ball with black paint, allow it to dry and press eight pipe cleaners, four on each side, into the ball. The foam ball becomes a spider when wiggly eyes are adhered with glue and the pipe cleaner legs are slightly bent in the center. Hang the spiders from the classroom spider web.
Paper Projects
Instruct each child to draw a spider web on the corner of a piece of paper by drawing diagonal lines and connecting those lines with smaller line segments. Press the child's thumb into a nontoxic and washable black ink pad and push the inked thumb onto the spider web to create a thumb print spider. Students can also cut one concave section from an empty paper egg carton and paint it black to create their own spider. Add eight pipe cleaner legs and wiggly eyes with glue. Thread a piece of string through the top and tie the opposite end of the string to a sturdy drinking straw to create a bouncing spider toy.
Tags: Little Miss, Little Miss Muffet, Miss Muffet, nursery rhyme, classroom spider, cleaner legs