Little Miss Muffet Art & Writing Activity

In my classroom, we have a Poem of the Week. It's always a short and simple poem and the repetition is great practice for my kiddos to build fluency. This week, we read the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet. I wanted to extend the experience into art and writing, so we made spider webs and the students wrote a response to where they thought Miss Muffet went after the spider scared her off. We had some very creative responses (China, behind a bush, in her tree house, and my favorite - under the bed!)

I came up with the idea for this project last week and was a little worried about how I was going to talk my kiddos through the process of drawing a web. Some of my kinders really struggle with the concept of using an entire drawing space and I had visions of teeny tiny webs on their big blank sheet of white drawing paper. So I devised a plan for instruction and it worked! Alleluia! Even my students that struggle with spatial concepts had success and created large, beautiful webs.

Here's the secret to my success: my ELMO document camera! Honestly, I don't know how I ever managed without it. Notice that the students do not have any crayons in their hand while I'm teaching and all of their eyes are on the screen. It took a few reminders, but I had their complete attention!

Step-by-step whole-group instructions thanks to my ELMO

FREEBIE resource download includes:
spider body template,
student writing pages, and
hallway display sign.

If you do the Miss Muffet activity in  your own classroom, you can download this helpful resource bundle for FREE! It includes a master copy for the spider bundle, student writing forms, and a poster that you can print for a hallway display (the poster consists of three 8.5"x11" pages that need to be glued together. Once trimmed, they fit great onto a 12"x18" sheet of construction paper.) Please let me know if you have any difficulty downloading this activity kit!

 
Teacher Prep for the Project

Here's all you'll need to create the project:
9"x12" construction paper sheets
white copy paper sheets cut to 7.5" squares
1 spider body circle per child (use the template provided to copy onto construction paper)
student writing response pages
LOTS of very skinny strips of paper (mine were 3" long and very skinny) - 8 per child
sponges cut into 1/2" cubes (or anything that will give the spiders a little "lift" from the page"
glue sticks (for mounting web and writing on construction paper)
white glue (for gluing sponge onto the paper)
Black crayon
Pencil

Here are the instructions I gave to my kiddos, broken down nice and simple :)

Make a Web

Prep ahead of time by folding papers diagonally,
then opening back up.

Have students use black crayon to trace over the folded X.

Start at the center of the X and continue drawing lines.
Remind students to go ALL the way to the edge.

Keep filling in lines all the way around the paper.

Start near the X and draw a shape around it.
I said it was "like a circle but with straight lines."

Add another "ring" around the X.

Continue to fill in lines around the center.

A finished web

Make the Spider

This little guy was so easy to make

Glue 8 paper strips around the edges of the spider
(4 on each side), then fold the legs 1 time so they bend

Flip spider over and add a face with marker
I drew 2 eyes - a few of my students informed me that
SPIDERS HAVE 8 EYES (true, but I thought 2 eyes was cuter.)

To give the project some depth:
Attach a piece of sponge with white glue and
affix spider to the sponge.

I mounted the web on construction paper before I added the sponge and spider

After that, you're ready to write!

I asked my students where they thought Miss Muffet ran to after the spider scared her. We shared ideas for a few days to provide them with lots of thinking time. After discussing it for one last time, I gave students the prompt "Along came a spider and Miss Muffet went..." I wrote the sentence starter on the board for students to copy, but they were on their own for spelling Miss Muffet's hiding place!