Preschoolers everywhere will learn about tuffets and curds and whey with this Little Miss Muffet free printable! Grab your copy toward the bottom of this post, and keep reading for lots of ideas for using these sequencing cards and nursery rhyme. Be sure to check out more of our free preschool printables if you like this one.
Related: Spider Crafts and Activities
Little Miss Muffet Free Printable
It’s always fun to introduce a few early English words to preschoolers, and they enjoy offering up their opinions on what they mean. With this Little Miss Muffet printable, you’ll get to engage in a lively vocabulary discussion, and also practice memorization, story retelling, patterning, and more!
This is my latest nursery rhyme printable, so after you print this out, be sure to also grab:
- Hickory, Dickory, Dock
- Little Bo Peep
- Row Row Row Your Boat
- Five Green and Speckled Frogs
- Humpty Dumpty
- Pat-A-Cake
- Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Materials List
You aren’t going to need to gather a ton of supplies for Miss Muffet, but if you want to add a few fun props and extra goodies when you’re using this printable, I’ve got some ideas listed below.
Here’s what we use for printables:
- Laminator
- Laminating sleeves
- Dry erase sleeves (as an alternative to laminating)
- Printer
And some optional items:
Do check out these really fun spider books for children!
Prep the Little Miss Muffet Free Printable
As with all of my printables, I recommend laminating if you will be using them more than once! Laminating will ensure the longevity of the printables.
To start off with, grab your own copy of the Little Miss Muffet printable. I suggest you read through this first and then get the copy at the very end.
Once you’ve gotten the printable, download it to your computer. You’ll want to save a copy in case you need it later.
Then open the file in the most up-to-date version of Adobe Reader. You might run into printing issues if you try to open it in the web preview or through other programs. Printing issues are not fun!
After it’s all printed, go ahead and cut the sequencing cards apart, laminate everything, and re-cut the cards apart.
How to Use This Nursery Rhyme Printable with Your Students
Have you ever wondered why we continue to teach nursery rhymes and the like to our kids? Read my post that answers the question, “Why is rhyming important?” for a little bit of insight. Not to mention rhyming is just plain fun!
Besides the rhyming aspect, this Little Miss Muffet printable includes sequencing cards that your students can use to re-tell the poem. Here is how we use our poems and sequencing cards, and then I will give you some more ideas to keep the Miss Muffet fun going!
- First, read the rhyme aloud while the students listen.
- Next, prompt the students to be your “echo.” You say a line and then point to the kids so they can repeat it.
- After a few times with the children as your “echo,” see if they can run through the poem altogether!
- Repetition is the key here. After a few times running through the poem, the students will have it down.
And that’s it! Once the kids have a basic understanding of how the poem goes, you can move onto the sequencing cards. You can place them in a pocket chart as the class recites Little Miss Muffet together, and then move onto the ideas below.
Even More Ideas for the Little Miss Muffet Printable
You can use the Little Miss Muffet cards for even more activities, thus reinforcing the poem. Besides just using them as sequencing cards, here are some more ideas that you can do with your kids. Using the cards in different ways will help the poem “stick” as the kids use various skills.
- This is a perfect time to practice dramatic play. The kids can act out being Miss Muffet or the spider as you (or they) chant the poem together. You can bet they’ll have fun running away from the spider!
- They can also use little figures and toy spiders to act out the rhyme, or they can get creative and make a drawing or collage of the different scenes in Little Miss Muffet.
- You can use the Little Miss Muffet cards as a team-building exercise for the kids. Have them work together in small groups to put the cards in order. This is a great way to promote peer interaction, turn-taking, and language skills.
- Have the children make up their own hand movements to go along with the rhyme. What can they all do together to indicate sitting on the tuffet? How can they show they are eating their curds and whey? What about when the spider shows up? Use the sequencing prompts as visual cues for the motions.
- Let the children make up their own lyrics to the tune! Maybe they want to substitute their own name for Miss Muffet’s.
- Set up a small world play or a sensory bin around the poem. Grab some small plastic spiders and people toys and place them near a tub of water or a tray with white water beads to act as the curds and whey.
Little Miss Muffet Nursery Rhyme
I always find it interesting to dig into the meaning and history behind nursery rhymes. There are usually several different wording options for these rhymes as they were passed along orally before appearing in books.
Little Miss Muffet tends to not change all that much in the way of lyrics – maybe just a slight word or spelling change here and there. Although there are some unusual variations that haven’t managed to stick as well as the original (“Little Miss Mopsey, Sat in the shopsey”).
Here are the words included in my printable:
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
Meaning of Little Miss Muffet
So is there a deeper meaning behind Miss Muffet simply being frightened by a spider? Probably not – some accounts attribute the rhyme to a 16th century entomologist, whose stepdaughter was frightened by a spider, but as with all nursery rhymes, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact origin.
The first written account of Miss Muffet dates 1805 in Songs for the Nursery.
What is a Tuffet?
You may think that a tuffet is a short stool, but apparently at the time of the writing of the poem, it was considered a small mound or cluster of grass (as in the word tuft).
As you can see here, there is also a second definition as a low seat, but this meaning wasn’t attributed to tuffet until 1895, while the grassy mound meaning dates back to 1553.
What is Curds and Whey?
Curds and whey are products of cheese-making. The milk separates into a liquid (whey) and curdled solid (curds), when an enzyme called rennet is introduced. Cottage cheese is the closest food we have today to curds and whey, although it was a popular snack hundreds of years ago!
Little Miss Muffet Videos
Use these videos along with your Little Miss Muffet printable to give your kids another way to familiarize themselves with the rhyme.
This ASL version of Little Miss Muffet can be taught to your kids as they listen to the rhyme!
Here’s another sign language version, with a child demonstrating the signs!
Here is an animated story/song version of Little Miss Muffet where Miss Muffet’s mom gets involved. 
The Cocomelon version of Little Miss Muffet is colorful, with a highly catchy tune.
And finally, this Little Miss Muffet retelling will have your preschoolers giggling at the spiders’ shenanigans!
Little Miss Muffet Preschool Lesson Plans
If you love hands-on printable for kids, you’re definitely going to love Preschool Teacher 101’s Little Miss Muffet lesson plans! They include weekly plans, detailed daily lessons, center activities, book suggestions, and related printables. It’s all ready for your own preschool classroom. Click on the photo below to get yours:
Get the Little Miss Muffet Free Printable
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