Shauna February 14, 2012
Do you know the Muffin Man? Well my daughters do now! Over the summer I had a large custom order to make 10 different puppets that went along with 10 different nursery rhymes for a preschool/childcare center. It was a lot of work, but SO much fun to design them all. The sad thing is that I never listed them in my shops. So, I figured it was about time that I started sharing them with others.  
As I decided to do a muffin themed day with my daughter and her friend for preschool, I remembered that I had made the cute “The Muffin Man” puppet, and that got my wheels turning in my brain.
The first thing I did was share with the girls the wonderful nursery rhyme, “The Muffin Man”, with them by reading out of my vintage childhood book, Mother Goose – A Treasury of Best Loved Rhymes. This book was edited by Watty Piper, and was illustrated by Tim and Greg Hildebrandt (who just happen to be twin brothers).
The illustrations in this book are just beautiful and the nursery rhymes are orgainized by themes. My dear grandmother Lois, who was a librarian in an Elementary School, and who help instill a love for books in me, gave this to me in 1980. My grandmother used to give me beautiful books on special occasions and she would always leave an inscription in the front cover. It is fun to go back and look when she gave me different books and what she had to say about them. Even though my dear grandmother passed away 12 years ago, the books she gave me that I now read to my own children help keep her memory alive.

 Here is a peak inside the book, although I need to share more of the wonderful illustrations with you. On a side note we have been reading a few pages out of this book at night, per my 5 and 7 year old daughters request. I am telling you, children are never too young for nursery rhymes and they are so important for children to learn for pre-reading and language skills.

 After we read the book we practiced saying the rhyme several times using a poster I made here until the girls felt comfortable saying it themselves. They loved it! Then they started to get to work on making their “Muffin Man” puppets.

 Here is a picture of “Little Red” and her friend gluing on the finishing touches.

I love this picture of the girls where their “Muffin Mans” are chatting with each other. Puppets are such a wonderful interactive learning tools that help foster creativity and oral language skills in children!

 The “Muffin Man” can also be put together as a 2 dimensional art project as well (as shown above) if you don’t want to make it into a puppet.

If you are wanting to make your own darling “Muffin Man” with your children or students you can find my “The Muffin Man Pack” in:
My Etsy Shop simply  CLICK HERE and my Teacher’s Notebook Shop CLICK HERE.
You will receive everything you see above with your digital purchase: a black and white “Muffin Man”, a colored “Muffin Man”, an 8 1/2″ x 11″ The Muffin Man Nursery Rhyme Poster, and Mini Nursery Rhyme Posters that can be glued to the back of the finished art projects. My favorite part about these puppets is that they are bigger than life. Love them!
Another activity we did during our muffin theme, was this fun math activity. I labeled cupcake liners with the numbers 1-12. I then placed them in a muffin tin. I told the girls that we needed to make some berry muffins but before we could add the batter we needed to count out the correct amount of berries for each muffin.  

Using some fun textured pom-poms that we have, the girls took turns filling up their muffin containers with berries. It was so fun to observe the two preschool girls because they each completed this task differently.

  • One of the girls would count out the amount they needed first in their hand, i.e. 4 berries, and then they would place it in the correct muffin tin marked with the number 4.
  • The other girl would choose a muffin tin that had a number on it, i.e. 6, and then they would one by one count six berries into the muffin tin.

I loved their different mathematical strategies they used to play this game. It is such an easy game to make and my daughter has played it over and over again.

Probably one of the girls favorite things we did for our muffin theme was to make pretend muffins out of play-doh. They did this forever! They had so much fun decided on how big to make the muffin, what color of play-doh to use, what berries they wanted, and who they wanted to make the muffins for. They would then pretend to bake the muffins once each batched was finished. They had a ball, and I had fun playing along with them. The 3 beautiful muffins above are made by “Little Red”.

Here is one batch of freshly baked and oh so scrumptious play-doh muffins. More muffin themed ideas and books to come soon! Happy baking!

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