Letter M: If You Give A Moose a Muffin

I love the book If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff.  So this week for Letter M I wanted to do a book theme surrounding that book. I miss doing book themed units, and even though this one wasn't as elaborate as I've done in the past (hey, give me a break, I'm a tired, ornery, pregnant lady!), it was still really fun to be doing a theme again.

We had to improvise on our letter craft a little bit, but I think they turned out cute, and you can still tell it's supposed to be a moose right?

Another activity I had Ivan do was a clothes pin matching number game. Basically there were cards for each number 0-10. At the top was a picture of a moose, in the middle was a certain number of muffins, and at the bottom were three numbers to choose from. Ivan had to look at each card and decide how many muffins each moose had, and then clip a clothes pin onto the correct number.

For the grand finale of M week, we made muffins. Whole Wheat Blueberry Muffins to be exact. And they were very tasty. And surprisingly, even with all the "help" I had, they still turned out. 

Of course they had to lick the bowl clean.

Whole Wheat Blueberry Muffins

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 cup brown sugar or honey

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/ tsp salt

1 cup blueberries (fresh or frozen work fine)

1 egg

1 cup buttermilk

3 Tbsp oil 

Topping

1/2 cup sugar

1/3 cup flour

1/4 cup butter, melted

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 375. Mix dry ingredients in bowl. Make a well in center. Add egg, buttermilk, and oil. Stir until moistened. Fold in blueberries.

2. In a separate bowl mix topping ingredients together.

3. Fill greased muffin cups 1/2 full with muffin batter. Sprinkle topping generously on top of each muffin.

4. Bake for 15 minutes. 

And, since we've been kind of cooped up all week and needed a change of pace, instead of lunch we had a tea party and served our muffins with bananas and oranges and Tang. It was the first tea party my kids had ever had, and they thought it was great.