Cooking Ideas

Several teachers have asked for recipes that I used to cook with my Kindergartners.  I am happy to share this chart of some of the cooking projects we did through the year.  I wasn’t usually this organized about it though – I made this chart by going through old lesson plans, not at the beginning of the year.  There were some cooking projects that I repeated every year, other times I was making something up as we went along.

Cooking themes

Here is another list of the cooking ideas:

cooking projects

I didn’t always have a written recipe for the children to follow, but when you can that adds another great learning extension – it gives the children a real life reason to read, and shows one way we use numbers and math skills.

Dinosaur Footprints were one of my own children’s favorite simple cooking projects, so of course I had to share that with Owen.

You will need bread, peanut butter (I called it prehistoric mud), jelly if desired (called berry bush jam) and a toaster.

Lightly toast a piece of bread and place it on the plate so that the rounded top of the bread is at the bottom.  You could do this with untoasted bread, but it is a little more difficult for children to cut.

Spread prehistoric mud (peanut butter) on the bread.

Use a plastic serrated knife to cut out 2 triangles (toe nails).  I always demonstrated the cooking project in front of the whole class before a parent volunteer called them to do it in small groups.  I talked about starting to cut at the corner of the bread, and pressing down with the knife while I sawed it back and forth.  Owen – at 2 – needed me to help him hand over hand.  Many Kindergartners can get the hang of using the knife with careful supervision.

I told the children these “toe nails” are a special treat!  Owen is usually a firm no-crust kind of guy, but he gobbled the triangle toe nails, crust and all.

Some dinos walk through berry bushes – the children decided whether to include the berry bush jam.

As you can see, Owen refused the crust on the footprint – but he loved it anyway!  At school I often offered prehistoric swamp water to go along with it – either milk tinted green with food color, or green Kool Aid.

Love Muffins

For Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day we made Love Muffins.  I bought Jiffy Baking Mix and used the directions for baking 12 muffins.  Our Cooking Mom called 6 kids at a time and involved all of them in the measuring and mixing.  They added 1 cup of semi sweet chocolate chips to the batter.  After spooning the muffins into the paper cups they sprinkled a mixture of cinnamon and sugar on top before baking.

We were able to use a real oven in our teacher’s lounge for baking projects.  If I had the luxury of an extra parent she might take a pan of muffins to the oven to cook as soon as it was filled.  If we only had one mom she waited to do the baking until all children had a chance to cook.  Each child ate one muffin at school, and took one home for Mom, or someone they loved.

ME Face

Me face

Along with our ME unit we made faces out of rice cakes.  I offered peanut butter or cream cheese to spread on.  For hair I also bought cheese puffs – the kind that are a couple of inches long.  The kids stuck them in and they really made the faces look funny.  For mouths I bought twistable red licorice.  We didn’t use much and it saved well for other projects.

Teddy Bear Pancakes

I used pancake mix that only required the addition of water.  Parents had to do the cooking on an electric griddle I bought for my room – you can usually find a pretty good one at a garage sale!  The parent made one big circle and 2 small circles for each child.  As you very well know – kids don’t wait well.  The parent would pre-make one set of the large and small pancakes – enough for a group of 5-6 kids.  Then she would call a group to come and mix up batter.  That group would eat the batch she had pre-made.  Then the next group would eat the batch the first group mixed up.  When you do this you have an extra batch of pancakes at the end – but it does make the process go more smoothly.  The secretaries and office loved getting our left overs.  Another suggestion would be to send kids to do a job of some sort while the pancakes cooked.  It just doesn’t work well to have them sitting and waiting at the table, inevitably there will be some who get rowdy.

I usually did this project early in the year when we were reviewing shapes and singing our circle song, to the tune of Frere Jacques.

This is a circle, this is a circle.

How can you tell?  How can you tell?

It goes round and round, no ends can be found

It’s a circle, it’s a circle.

They arranged the 2 small circles at the top for ears.  You can use chocolate chips or raisin for eyes if you’d like.  It gives the kids a chance to carefully serve themselves syrup too.

If you are cooking with children – or for that matter, anything you do with children, you need to think carefully about what you expect the children to learn from the experience.  Cooking experiences provide lots of opportunities to learn new vocabulary, practice numeric and math skills, fine motor development, social interactions, read recipes, incorporate science concepts, etc.  It didn’t matter to me whether the recipe was simply assembling food into shapes or actually cooking or baking.  Sometimes I referred to it as Cooking or Snack Math, so parents would understand that we wouldn’t always be actually cooking.   Most of the time the kids absolutely loved it!

Pudding in a Cloud

Waffle Clouds

I usually made one of these for our cooking project  during our weather unit.  To make Pudding in a Cloud I purchased instant chocolate pudding (or canned) and Cool Whip.  The children helped mix the pudding, and let it set.  They spooned Cool Whip into a clear plastic cup (like a punch cup) and spread it around the sides.  Then they spooned chocolate pudding inside.  Yum!

Sometimes waffle clouds consisted of toasted waffles, dusted with powdered sugar.  The kids loved using the sifter to serve the powdered sugar.  Other times I brought in my waffle iron and the children mixed up the batter – usually using a mix – and we actually made the waffles.

Mickey Mouse Sundaes

I am a big Mickey fan so we always celebrated his birthday (Nov. 18!).  One of our projects was making Mickey Sundaes – each child got a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and 2 small brown circle cookies.  I often used vanilla wafers because this was quite a big snack already..  Mickey’s eyes were M & Ms, his mouth was licorice and his nose was a chocolate malted milk ball – like Whoppers.  Hey – if you are a parent of trick or treat aged children you can save some of that candy for projects like this.  I also used to set aside Halloween candy to use for Gingerbread Houses.

3 Bears Porridge

I gave each child a packet of instant oatmeal.  They opened the package and poured it into a small bowl, an adult added the hot water (not boiling because it takes too long for it to cool!)  I provided choices of things to add like raisins, cinnamon, chocolate chips, etc.  The children stirred it and ate it!

Gummi Bear Graphs

You could do this kind of sorting and graphing with lots of foods – M & Ms, Froot Loops, any kind of gummis, Valentine conversation hearts etc.  I used gummi bears to introduce the whole concept.  We started out by sorting the bears by color.  I made construction paper sorting mats, I used the Ellison die cut machine to cut out the 4 colors of teddy bears – one for each mat.  I made 7 mats – one for me to demonstrate, 6 for the center.  I glued those bears onto dark blue construction paper and laminated them.  The children each got a baggie with about 12 gummi bears and sorted them by placing them on the matching color.  Here is a chart you could also use:

You might color the bars containing the color words to help the children.

You could use this recording sheet to practice counting, 1 to 1 correspondence and numeral writing.

Or you could use a graph like this:

When I demonstrated this graph I actually laid the bears onto the graph to make a concrete graph.  I talked about how I wanted to take my graph home, and I couldn’t pick it up with the bears on it so I showed the children how I could color each printed bear as soon as I removed the real bear and ate it.

Here are copies to print:

bear_graph

Gummy Bear Graph sheet

bear_sorting_sheet-5

Please check back, I have lots more cooking ideas and recipes to share!

Cooking Ideas

I really enjoyed cooking in school, but I just love cooking with Owen.

I always thought that cooking was a natural way to integrate science concepts, reading (recipes), vocabulary, good health habits, math and social skills.  Exactly how you go about it probably depends a lot on the make up of your classroom.  I was very fortunate to have good parent support, and most parents donated money to support our cooking projects.  I asked for 50 cents per week, and that covered paper products as well as supplies.  Not all parents sent in the money, but most did.  When I first began cooking at school I asked for donations of the ingredients and supplies, but I was concerned that parents might forget so I usually bought a back up set anyway.  Also sometimes parents would not send exactly what I thought I was asking for, so I decided just to ask for money, and I did the shopping myself.  Most parents paid by the semester, or the entire year – so I didn’t have to keep collecting the money all year.  I realize that not all schools are able to ask for donations.

The other requirement is to have a good parent volunteer who is excited about cooking with the children.  I liked having the same Mom every week if possible, because she was able to quickly get to know the children and the routine.   I made a check off chart that was very helpful for the cooking moms.

I glued one of these charts to a piece of 9 x 12 construction paper, then laminated it.  I put the laminated chart on a clipboard and provided vis a vis markers.  As the parent called small groups of children at a time to do the cooking project she could check off their name on the chart, to be sure every child got a turn.  I used these charts over and over when I wanted to hold each child accountable for completing an activity, and often when I was assessing them.  I could label the columns things like – counts to 30, recognizes shapes, makes an AB pattern, etc.

Here is another class list that I used all the time – this one gave a small space to write a note about each child – I used it the first day to note which children could write their name, and make a quick note of behaviors that stood out.  When the children completed a project I might use one of these pages to write a simple note about fine motor skills, phonetic spelling, recognizable drawing, etc.

I bound a bunch of these note taking class lists into a booklet.  This was an easy way to keep anecdotal notes, and  I could always find my notes about the children when I needed them.   Sorry – I guess I strayed from my cooking talk!

I bought lots of books to get ideas for cooking projects.  Here are a few:

I will give a little peek into each book by including a sample page.

I would usually cut apart the pictures and put them on numbered, stand up cards for the children to follow the recipe.

 

One of my favorite ways to cook is called Cup Cooking

I didn’t use a lot of recipes from this book because some were not things I thought the kids would love to eat.  But I loved the concept of this – each child would take 2 Tbsp. flour, 1 tsp. sugar, 1/2 Tbsp. butter (for example) and mix it together in a small cup, and it would make just a single serving – something like 2 cookies or 1 biscuit, etc.  With Cup Cooking each child added ALL the ingredients for the recipe for their own single serving.

Today Owen and I made a recipe that I always called Ghost Toast.  In Kindergarten we made these around Halloween time – but I found a recipe that calls it Rainbow Toast – great for during a weather unit – or any time you want a fun, simple recipe that almost all children will love.

First we got out the supplies we would need.

Then we put 2-3 drops of food coloring into a small amount of milk in each bowl.

I bought new inexpensive paintbrushes at a Dollar Store.

We used the paintbrushes to paint a picture on the bread.

Owen (at 2 1/2) is not into recognizable pictures yet!  I drew a few simple shapes – they might not be very recognizable either!

When we did this for Halloween I modeled a crescent moon, ghost, etc.

Then we put the bread into the toaster, and the colors come out even brighter!

Owen spread his own butter.

I found this recipe for Rainbow Toast in one of my books – it is the same basic idea.

Cooking is such a fun, worthwhile activity.  If you are considering it for this new school year I’d really encourage you to give it a try!  I will be sharing more recipes soon!

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

I used the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar for a preschool storyhour, and wanted a way to engage the children, most of them had already heard and seen this story.  I used colored posterboard to make story boards of each page in the book.  I cut the posterboard into rectangles about 22 x 9 1/2 – I made these a long time ago, but I think I basically cut each posterboard in 1/3s.  Making a project like this takes quite a bit of time, but I used it with my Kindergartners over and over again for many years.

I used construction paper and cut out the tree, leaf, moon and egg, then I rubber-cemented them onto the posterboard.

On the back of each posterboard I wrote the words from the story so I could hold up the picture and read the words.

Because these pictures were so big and it was a new way to hear the story, it really kept the children’s attention.

I cut a hole – using an exacto knife – through the apple and the posterboard.
I made a caterpillar from small red and green pompoms.

I stuck the pompoms onto a piece of magnet strip – using the sticky side of the magnet to hold the pompoms on.  I have used this caterpillar for 20 years!!  I just keep it in the file with the posterboards, it is a little flattened from all those years of storage!!

This looks quite big here, but  it is only about 2 1/2 inches long.  Then I took a rubber band and slipped it over the caterpillar between the red and first green pompom.  If you don’t have a small rubberband twist it on a few times – leaving just enough room for your pointer finger to slip in under the caterpillar, on the magnet side.

Then you can poke the caterpillar through the hole in the apple, and pretend to munch, munch, munch all the way around the circle.  The kids love it!!

If you don’t want to make a caterpillar, you could just draw eyes and a mouth on your pointer finger and use that.

One thing you have to remember is to poke your finger into the right hole so you are helping reinforce counting from left to right.  I added sound effects like slurping, munching, gobbling, etc. as the caterpillar ate through the hole in each food.

When you are cutting out the strawberries and stems, I folded the paper and cut all 4 at once to make it faster, then I just tipped them a bit as I glued them onto the board.

Over the years we made lots of different projects to go along with this story.  For preschoolers we wrapped a pipe cleaner around a pencil to make it coiled up and called it a caterpillar.  Then we ‘decorated’ a brown paper lunch bag for the cocoon.  We made a butterfly by pushing tissue paper into the legs of a slip on wooden clothespin.  We put the butterfly inside the paper bag and as the children retold the story – they put the caterpillar into the bag, pretended he was nibbling his way out, and pulled out the butterfly.

In recent years I used this near the end of the year in Kindergarten and my children were ready to write phonetically, and reread some text.  We made a book to retell the story.

This is a half page sized book.

 

 

The first letter of the day of the week was already printed on the page.  The children also need to write the number word on some pages.  I provided “helper sheets” for them to refer to if they needed help writing the days of the week or number words.  You could cut these into strips of days/numbers if you’d like.

 

 

To make this book a little easier, the children drew the parts they would glue on first.  Then the next day we made the books, they just bubble cut around their pictures and glued them on.  Most children were pretty independent with this.

There were 2 on this page – each child got 1/2.

I put little picture cues to help them remember each food.  The children could draw with crayons or markers.  I didn’t leave a space for them to write their name – be sure they write their name on the back of their paper!

On this page they had to draw at least 3 things, and write the words phonetically.

They just had to color the cocoon or chrysalis, it was already printed on the page.  I debated over the years over whether to keep using the word cocoon that was in the text, but I used this book with end-of-the-year kindergartners and we had been talking about how a butterfly comes from a chrysalis – so I used that term.

The children created a butterfly – practicing symmetry – but using a folded piece of paper and free cutting the wings, then decorating both sides the same – and glued it on.

Here are the masters for this book – there are 2 on each page so you can xerox, collate and just cut each book in half to make 2.  Sorry about all the separate files – not sure how to put them all together!  I am definitely not a techie person!

cover

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday again

big

chrysalis

butterfly

Foods

helping sheets

I hope you have as much fun with this as I have!

 

Last Minute Mother’s Day!

Here are a couple more last minute gift ideas for Mother’s Day!

When I did this project with my class I just had one flower on the page and we used a 9 x 12 paper.  For my daughter in law I included all 3 handprints!  I hope she likes it!

I loved making “hugs” that the children could give their moms – in case their mother needed a hug while they were away at school!

I folded large paper 6 x 18 inches, then I traced each child’s hand and arm.  They cut it out and added a poem.  I didn’t have a sample so I simulated!  To send it home we folded the arms at the “elbows.”

Here is the poem we used – if it doesn’t fit on the heart template you make, just reduce or enlarge it on the copy machine – sorry I didn’t keep the original!  

Printable poem!

poem

Whether you have your own children at home or not, I wish you all a wonderful Mother’s Day!  In a special way all Kindergarten teachers are Moms to their kids!  And that is what I miss!

Bunny Day!

It was fun to celebrate spring and Easter with a special Bunny Day – sometimes we called it Jellybean Jamboree!

Sometimes we learned Rabbit Facts with Roxie Heart -

We measured with jellybeans

It was fun to watch them problem solve to measure a balloon with jellybeans!

I filled plastic eggs with rice, pennies, bells, etc. and the children listened to them to figure out which egg contained each item.  They wrote the name of the egg color next to a picture of the item in the egg.  One year our Bunny Day happened to fall on a school wide pajama day too!

I used this type of activity quite a often to monitor the children’s phonetic spelling.  They just stretched out the sounds and labeled each picture.  It gave me great information about how well they were hearing sounds and matching letters and sounds.  When they were actually writing a story they had so many other things to think about – their idea, spaces, their drawing, etc.  This activity just focused on writing the sounds.

Here is one to print:

Easter phonetic spelling

For most of the jellybean activities the children shared a bowl of jellybeans – but of course they wanted to eat some too – so each child got a baggie-ful and graphed the colors and ate them!

We made Bunny Bags and parents sent in donations to fill them.  I made one with Owen this week!

You can make Bunny Bags with plain brown lunch bags, and they are cute too – but I usually got white or pastel colored bags (Target!)  Each child also needs one pink pom pom and a cotton ball.

I made a template and traced it onto the bag – make sure the flap for the bottom of the bag is tucked to the back.  Kindergartners could do their own tracing if you make sure the template is the same size as the bag, and they remember to turn it ear side up!

Then cut the top of the bag into a bunny shape!

Owen is working on scissor control (remember he’s only 2!)  Thumb up Owen!

For the eyes Kindergartners could free cut them, or cut out white and use circle sticker dots for the center – or you could provide oval and circle tracers for those too!

 

Owen loves glue sticks!

Next cut a rectangle of black paper into 3 thin strips (about 6 inches long)  Glue them on criss cross, right under the eyes.

 

Then glue on a pom pom nose – or cut out a pink construction paper circle.  Glue sticks don’t work well with pom poms.

 

Add a cottonball tail to the back.

 

 

Don’t forget to put the lid back on the glue!

 

Owen wanted to put something inside as soon as he was done – the crayons were handy.

 

 

Put a good handful of Easter grass inside – I chop it up a bit with scissors to make it easier to handle.

 

These are sturdy enough to hold filled plastic eggs, small candies, small toys, etc.  (This makes me feel like Pioneer Woman’s cooking pictures!)

 

At school I loved to play with the children.  I would fill all their bunny bags and have them sitting in bins on a table where the children could see them.  Then when the children went to lunch or a special (p.e., music, art) I would take the bags out to the playground – or more often our Media Center; and hide them!  Then I made Bunny footprint tracks!  I cut a piece of tagboard into a large bunny footprint shape, I set it on the carpet and sprinkled flour over it, rubbing it in a little (it vacuums up easily!)  I made footprints outside our classroom door, and leading down the hall either toward the Media Center or out the door to the playground.  Then I let the children find them missing and come to the conclusion that the Easter Bunny had come and hidden our bags!  Of course you have to be dramatic and pretend to be upset that they are missing.

One nice feature of these bags is that you can staple the ears to keep stuff from falling out inside their backpacks!

We also made Bunny hats!

And had a celebration!

We made windsocks and took them outside to play!

Trash Can Snack!

I loved cooking with Kindergartners, although truthfully I wasn’t usually the one who actually did the cooking with them.  This is the type of activity you really need a parent volunteer to help with.  In my class we cooked every week, and I was sad that I don’t have any good pictures to show all the fun cooking projects, so I decided to recreate some of these recipes with Owen.  Of course safety is the first concern, so much of my cooking with children is really more assembling food, but my classroom was stocked with an electric frying pan, a toaster oven, a microwave, a griddle and an individual burner, plus we had a stove in the teacher’s lounge.  If you are interested in collecting cooking equipment parents are often willing to donate things, and garage sales have great deals!

So here is my first installment of Cooking with Owen!  (Who is not thrilled to have his picture taken these days!)  His talented mom Sheri decorated his special cooking apron!

Today’s recipe goes along with our Recycling Unit.  We made trash cans.  Here are the ingredients:

There are so many benefits that come from cooking with children, they learn new vocabulary, experiment with measuring and counting, scooping and pouring; and notice changes from heating and cooling ingredients.  It sometimes even gets children to try out new foods!  I tried to create some type of visual step by step recipe for each cooking project.  This time I made little signs to tell the children how many of each item to put into their “trash can.”

Each child took one empty ice cream cone for their trash can.

They counted out 4 pretzel “sticks.”

They each took 8 old tires or wheels.  I really used regular Cheerios, but I didn’t have a good box for the photo of ingredients.

For styrofoam pieces I gave Owen popcorn pieces.  At school I often used mini marshmallows.

As you can see, the M & M “stones” were Owen’s favorite!  When you only have one student you can relax the rules a bit!

All the ingredients were lined up in order.

Please excuse the stuff I should have put away in my kitchen before we started!

It was a little tricky keeping Owen safe on his stool, taking the picture and keeping him from a preview taste!  He chose all brown M & M’s to put in his trash can, but then he ate a few other colors too!

All in all Chef Owen did a great job!

 

Then he decided to sit right down on his stool to enjoy his Trash Can snack!

Here are my little “recipe cards.”

And here they are if you’d like to print them.

Trash cans

I really loved cooking with my Kindergartners, and trying out all this stuff with Owen is even more fun!

Thank you!!

I love reading other people’s blogs.  It is just amazing to see how talented and funny so many people are.  It is such a great way to get a little peek into people’s lives and realize once again that we are all probably m0re alike than we are different.  If you haven’t tried it, one thing you might not realize is how important all the readers are to the blogger.

I get so excited every time someone leaves a comment about one of my posts.  I love the idea that someone – some place – is reading about things I liked doing with my Kindergartners, and sometimes they even like the ideas!  I just wanted to say thank you to all of my readers – wow – my readers!

I know really well what the life of a Kindergarten teacher is like.  You have to get to school as early as you can, to get your act together before the munchkins arrive.  Everything has to be ready because you can’t go cut paper or get out the glue or turn your back on those 4-6 year olds!  Then there is not a minute’s break while the kids are with you.  Even when you are not directly teaching or working with a child, someone needs a shoe tied, a tissue supplied, a reminder about not writing on the table, or standing on the table, or cutting their friend’s hair.  The old saying about needing eyes in the back of your head is clearly not enough for a Kindergarten teacher – you need 360 degree vision, and 20 pairs of hands.  Not to mention trying to teach all the benchmarks, interact in their play, differentiate your instruction, build their self esteem, conduct meaningful assessments that guide your instruction, maintain a semblance of order and keep them all safe.

Sometimes they go to lunch, or P.E. or music.  Usually most of that time is used up getting a bandaid for someone who fell on the way, talking to a parent who stops you in the hall, or writing a note, or making a phone call.  I always forgot to go to the bathroom right away – that’s why teachers have so many bladder infections.

Then before you go home – you have to clean up, get stuff out for the next day, touch base with teaching partners, make copies or get projects ready – it just doesn’t end.  At last it’s time to go home where so many teachers keep right on with different kinds of prep until bedtime – fitting in family time as best you can.

So, the idea that some of you spend your precious time reading my blog is very humbling.  I think of my blog as my transition away from teaching Kindergarten.  I really did love it, and miss it a lot.  I am just delighted with my grandchildren and I know what a privilege it is for me to be able to see them so often, and be part of their lives, it is where I am supposed to be right now – but all those stories, songs and projects are still part of me too.  Thank you for allowing me to share my ideas and activities and memories with all of you!  And if you ever have a minute – I’d love to hear from you!

Merry Christmas!

Here are my adorable Anna and Lily!  I couldn’t resist sharing how cute I think they are!  I will be sure to share more Owen pictures soon too!  Thanks for indulging me!

 

Thank you, Santa!

Last night Santa visited my house.  It just so happened that my grandchildren were visiting too!

Owen wasn’t too smiley, but he was willing to sit on Santa’s lap!  He loved the little stampers and coloring book that Santa brought.

Nobody cried!

Lily and Anna seemed pretty comfortable!

For many years my own personal Santa visited my classroom.  We were so happy that he could still fill this role for our grandchildren!   We are so blessed!

Merry Christmas!!

Nursery Rhyme Projects

Hey!  I finally posted a copy of the Nursery Rhyme book that several people have been asking about!  You can find it under the Rhyming section, at the end of the blog I first wrote to tell about it.  Sorry it took me so long!

I love sharing Nursery Rhymes with children.  I am starting to repeat them and read them to my grandson, Owen.  I have a few little toys that I use to act them out for him.  In my classroom we acted out most of them because I think that’s a great way to help children remember them.  We also made projects to go along with a lot of the rhymes when I was teaching Kindergarten.

I did not save many of my files when I retired, but when I borrowed back the book I used to reinforce Nursery Rhymes from a friend I taught with (Thank you Laura!) she had several of the projects I used to do with kids in the same file.

For Mary Had a Little Lamb I took a 9 x 12 piece of paper and folded it in 3rds, the tall way.  Then I stapled or taped it like a tent.  The children decorated and cut out a lamb head and body.  They glued them onto the front of the little tent, on the back they glued the poem.  The third side was on the bottom.  We punched a hole near one top corner and attached a piece of yarn.  The children could walk and pull the lamb behind them.  I especially loved making projects that the kids could play with!  Here are the patterns for the lamb:

Mary Had Little Lamb

It was fun to make a Humpty Dumpty that could actually ‘fall off the wall.’  The children traced and cut out a large oval from a 9 x 6 piece of white paper.  Then they tore red paper into ‘bricks,’ and glued them onto a 9 x 6 piece of black paper.  Tearing paper is such a great activity to develop fine motor strength and control.  They used a brad fastener to hold Humpty onto the top of the wall.  As they recited the story they could turn Humpty upside down.  We glued a copy of the poem on the back.    We often cooked scrambled eggs to go along with this project!

For several of the poems we made little booklets they could decorate to reinforce the rhyme.

Here is Little Boy Blue.

Little Boy Blue

I would copy these pages back to back and fold them in half.  I had clipart of  a cow, a sheep, a horn and a haystack.  The children colored them and glued them onto the right page.  They taped the haystack so they could lift it up and see the boy sleeping under it.  (Sorry, my friend didn’t have copies of the clipart but it would be easy to find – or have the children draw!)

The Old Mother Hubbard book was similar.

Old Mother Hubbard

The children folded a piece of tan or brown paper for a cupboard, then drew what might have been inside the cupboard if she didn’t have food (spiderwebs, empty boxes, etc.)  Then they drew or added clipart pictures to finish the rhyme.

Hey Diddle Diddle was a smaller fold up – it ended up being 1/4 page size.  The idea was the same though.  I found when the children made a little booklet like this it really helped them to remember and recite the rhyme.

Hey Diddle Diddle

I hope you have fun with these rhymes with your class too!