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!