I suspect that many of you are familiar with Canadian author, Robert Munch, but did you know that on his website you can listen along while he tells stories? “Mud Puddle” is one of my all time favorites.

“Mud Puddle was the first story that I ever made into a book. I made it up one very wet Spring in 1976 when I was working in a nursery school.

The playground had turned into a large mud hole and the children always got very dirty whenever they went outside, but there wasn’t really very much the kids could do about it.

I got the idea that the kids might like a story about mud; so I made up a story about a mud puddle that jumped on kids from out of trees. The kids thought it was a great story. The first time I told it they went out into the playground and looked up in the trees for mud puddles. They thought that mud puddles living in trees would explain why they got dirty so much. I decided that it was a pretty good story.”