Nursery Rhymes

It's been several months since I blogged.  I've fully intended to, and it really surprised me to find myself without a clue what to write about, now that I don't have a class full of kiddos anymore.   It's definitely different, being a teacher without a class, and without all the normal creative supplies that I guess I haven't been without in 21 years.  You know, simple things like paint and blocks and toys.  I probably could, and maybe should, write about the process of letting go of those things, and how much more of me went along with them than I realized.  Who would have thought that the creative side of me depended upon having paint in the cabinet and small children running around?  

Anyway, I have been working away hard on my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and love it!  It's a different kind of creativity, one that uses the computer rather than paper and glue, and while I am very excited about the things I'm creating there, I don't want my blog to be just an extension of my store.  You don't come here for that, or at least, not only for that!  Teaching and learning ideas is what this blog needs to focus on, so I've been at a blogging stand still.  Until now.

This morning I realized that I want to share my TpT creations AND other teaching ideas, and I have enough photos of children and their projects to last a very long time!  Today I want to share ideas around Nursery Rhymes - some I've written about before, and others are brand new.  I hope you find something you can use with your children!

Humpty Dumpty 

I wrote before about a fun egg dropping activity I found at Mrs Kelly's Kindergarten.  She recommends hard boiling an egg, then predicting whether it will break when dropped on different surfaces, and testing to find out.  The children LOVED this activity!

I'll let you in on a secret - this doesn't end well for Humpty!

The Muffin Man
I've always had the children make muffins and a Muffin Man book when we learn about the letter M.  I simply typed up an opening page with the rhyme on it, then each child filled in their name and a type of muffin on their pages, which went:  _____ is the muffin girl/boy, muffin girl/boy, muffin girl/boy, who likes _______ muffins.  If you want the pages already typed up and printed for you, it is included in my Class Books For Every Letter of the Alphabet.

 

The Queen of Hearts

Q is such a difficult letter to find things for, so we have always taken full advantage of The Queen of Hearts nursery rhyme!  The Missing Tarts by B. G. Hennessy is a fun book to use, as the characters search for the tarts through many different nursery rhymes, and a recipe is included in the book.

 We liked to dress up as royal characters, and we have been lucky enough to be visited by HRH the Queen (a neighbor and personal friend of mine), for whom we practiced our best manners, and made the tarts.  The children love it when adults join on in the pretend!

This Little Piggy or To Market To Market

I created this cute piggy craft for International Mud Day, but it would work well with a piggy nursery rhyme too if you changed the words you put with it.  Adults traced the circles for the body, head and snout, triangles for ears, and squares for legs, then the children cut them out.  Half a pipe cleaner curled around a pencil made a nice little piggy tail!

 Five Little Ducks, or Six Little Ducks That I Once Knew
There are so many possibilities!  The duck hand print is fairly self explanatory, and the construction paper ducks were very simple: I provided either adult or baby duck shapes, and the children tore construction paper scraps (strengthen those little fingers!) and glued them on.  Don't forget to incorporate real animals when you can!

Jack Be Nimble
This is another nursery rhyme that lends itself to a class book.  _______ be nimble, _____ be quick, _____ jump over the candlestick!  As you can see, our candle stick was the non-flammable kind, but that didn't bother the children at all.  It's not every day that the teacher invites you to run and jump inside!

Mary Had a Little Lamb
This one is also included in my class book set mentioned above.  _____ had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb.... so easy, and who doesn't like stuffed animals?  Don't have a sheep?  Ask the parents, or try garage sales, it's amazing what you can find!

 
I've also mentioned this one before, it's available for FREE here! I made two versions, one with a picture to color, and this one for us to paint our own sheep on.  I provided the black head shape and eyes after the children finger painted their colorful sheep.  It amazes me how different each sheep is when we make this, and the children love reading the books they helped to make.

The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Okay, I'll admit it, I don't think this one is included in any of the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme collections, but every child knows it and loves it, so I'm going to include it!  I found this idea in Mailbox Magazine several years ago.  It's simply a house shape, with a bendy-end straw as a waterspout, with a Halloween spider ring slipped onto it.  A little tape at the top and bottom of the straw so the spider doesn't get lost, and as you can see, the children loved to sing the song and act it out.  Coloring our houses and moving the spider were fine motor workouts, and with the song added in we have literacy and vocabulary development too.  Not too bad for a bendy straw and a plastic spider!

If you have children who are learning to read, I do have one more fun nursery rhyme activity to share with you:  My Nursery Rhyme Sentence Picture Match has 12 simple sentences and pictures for young readers to pair up.  It makes a fun center activity, and there is a follow up worksheet included.  My kindergarteners last year LOVED my sentence picture matching activities, and inspired me to start making more of these activities.    






Of course there are many, many other nursery rhyme ideas that I haven't touched on.  I have some pinned to my Nursery Rhyme Pinterest board,
and I'm always on the lookout for more fun teaching ideas.  Do you have a favorite nursery rhyme activity you'd like to share?  I'd love to hear from you!

Letter E activities (part one)

I'd start by saying it's been another busy week here at school, but really, when is it not?  There are always so many fun things we want to do,  and the backyard always beckons us too, so it is always busy.  Children are very busy people, constantly doing and learning!  

As we do each week, we made our hand print alphabet crafts: eagles and elephants this week.

 Getting paint on our hands is a fun sensory experience, and adding the details to the dried prints works out our fine motor skills, and results in a project that our moms and dads will treasure.  Sounds like a winner to me!

 We played Elefun, a game that's been around for a very long time, and is still cool!  The children love being able to turn it on and off, to catch or pick up the butterflies, and to put them back in so they can play it over again.  They practiced taking turns and working together, and look at their faces - pure joy!  Several times they broke into spontaneous jumping and clapping and giggling, which is a lovely thing to watch!

 We identified and matched shapes and colors with a scrambled eggs game too.

 On this particular day we had read Humpty Dumpty, and the kiddos got to work together to make a giant Humpty Dumpty puzzle. 

 It wouldn't be Humpty Dumpty day without an egg on a wall!  This idea came from Mrs. Kelly's Kindergarten, and the children LOVE it!

 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.  We knew he was going to have a great fall!  I put down different surfaces for him to fall on, and the children predicted whether Humpty would break on each one.  Felt?  He cracked!

 Pee-ew, he smells like a hard boiled egg!  (Some children thought that smelled good, but it was much more fun to pretend it was stinky!)

 Humpty also took turns falling on cotton balls, and paper towels.  Do you wonder if he broke?  You'll have to hard boil and egg and try it yourself!  I will tell you that falling all the way to the floor was not a good plan for Humpty!  The children wanted us to drop him again and again, they really liked seeing - and hearing - him hit the ground!

 So what on earth can we do to follow that up?  :-)  We're making scrambled eggs for lunch, of course!

E is for elephants and eggs

E is definitely for elephant!  We are very lucky to be close to the Fort Worth Zoo, where there are hundreds of amazing animals.  Every year we buy season passes to the zoo, so we can go as often as we want.  Here's one of our favorite photo spots...

 

 It isn't every time we go that we get to see elephants taking a bath, but this week we did!

 Best of all, this summer the Fort Worth Zoo welcomed 2 baby elephants to their herd - and we got to watch them playing.  Bowie was trumpeting and racing around, while Bluebell stayed close to her mother.

 

Another fun activity I like to do this week is smashing eggshells.  I saw this idea on www.babble.com last year, and my kiddos love it!  We had eggs for lunch one day, and I saved and washed the shells.  A box, a mallet, and safety glasses rounded out the materials needed.  This is a free, fun, sensory activity that children (and adults!) enjoy!

 I saved all the crushed shells in a zippered baggie, added food coloring and just enough rubbing alcohol to disperse the coloring, and made dyed egg shells.  Once they were dry, the children wrote large letter Es in pencil, and then wrote over them in glue before adding the crushed shells.  This was another sensory activity for the children, as well as a letter review and glue practice.  We got some bang for our buck out of our scrambled eggs!

 I found an awesome Humpty Dumpty activity on skellyskindergarten.blogspot.com. A hard boiled Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, then fell on various surfaces.  The children first predicted (a fancy science word for guessed) whether Humpty would break when he fell on each surface. 

 Humpty Dumpty did not break when he fell on the cotton balls!  He still looks so happy.

 All the children agreed that he was sure to break when he fell all the way to the floor, with no protective surface.  We did a count down from 10, and let him go on 0...

 Oh! Smashed!

 Here's the recording sheet I created to go with the activity. 

 We also enjoyed playing with plastic Easter eggs and finding the letters hidden inside.  We sorted the letters into Ee and Not Ee.

One of our friends is having a birthday, so she and two friends made birthday cake with me.  This was her first time to crack an egg, so I held her hands and helped her.  Next time she'll know how to do it all by herself!

Finally, we finished off the week with a cute Elmo craft that I found at TheCleverFeather.blogspot.com.  While I usually prefer art projects to crafts, this one offered so much that I had to use it.  The children got to tear the red paper into small pieces, an excellent fine motor activity to strengthen little fingers, and to prepare them for future writing activities.  They used scissors to cut out circles, a half circle and an oval - both another fine motor skill and a review of shapes, and then they had to squeeze the glue out of the bottle (more strengthening those hand muscles) to stick on all the parts.  Who could resist Elmo?!