{Nursery Rhymes} & {Fairy Tales}

I have been waiting for ever to have Nursery Rhyme week! It was SO much fun! Nursery Rhymes are so catchy and silly and they have a lot to offer in the literacy department! Nursery rhymes help teach rhyming, obviously, but they also have rhythm, alliteration, which helps them recognize beginning sounds and as children memorize and repeat them they are learning the phonemes of those familiar words! We sang, clapped, stomped, recited and acted out nursery rhymes all week long and it was a ton of fun. Below I've listed just a few of the activities we did besides making all of those literacy connections! ;)
The Isty Bitsy Spider
We had some Itsy Bitsy Spider water play. It was a hit.

We also have been studying shapes, so we made shape houses and taped down a straw as the spout with a spider ring attached so we could move the spider up and down the spout while we sang the song.

Everyone chose shapes to make their houses and then they personalized their houses with details!

Baa Baa Black Sheep

Next we made sheep from the Baa Baa Black Sheep rhyme. We used coffee filters and the peas had to squeeze the black liquid onto the coffee filters to make their sheep black. It was great fine motor work!

Little Bo Peep

Ms. Angela hid Little Bo Peep's sheep all over the classroom and then we had a sheep hunt! We have been working on subitizing numbers and using tally marks, so we had dots on some sheep and tallies on others. We found all of them and returned them to the tray with the number that matched the sheep.

We also made Little Bo Peep little books at art so we could read them independently.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

We borrowed this boat and sang this song over and over!

To practice phonemic awareness, we changed the first letter of the rhyme to make silly nonsense words.

There Was an Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe

For morning message the peas added themselves to the shoe.

I love all these little people in our shoe house!

London Bridges Falling Down

For London Bridges we did an engineering project in blocks. We have been practicing making a plan when building and then seeing if we can construct our plan. We researched the London Bridges on the ipads and looked at other bridges for inspiration.

Do You Know the Muffin Man?

This may have been our favorite all week. On Wednesdays we usually do a cooking project, so what's better than warm muffins with butter? Not much! We made muffins and then graphed if we liked them or not. They were a hit.

We turned home center into a bakery to make muffins and used playdough for our cooking creations.

Humpty Dumpty

We turned Mr. Potato head into Humpty Dumpty and worked on building a wall for him. It was difficult for Humpty aka Mr. Potato head to balance on the walls so we had to strategize how to build a wall to support him.

Mary Mary Quite Contrary

For Mary, Mary Quite Contrary we planted tulips! We discussed bulbs and how they are different than seeds. We passed them around and talked about how we would plant them deep in the ground and they will sleep all winter. When spring comes, they will sprout and grow into beautiful flowers! Notice our decomposing "Jack" on the side of the garden. He is getting pretty disgusting. They love it.

The next week we discussed castles and all the things that go with them as we dove into fairy tale week. We have a castle in our room so we played with that and tried to identify all the figures as knights, kings, queens and princesses.

We painted cardboard boxes to make a castle in our room!

There were no shortage of princesses to inhabit the castle all week.

In blocks, we added knights, princesses, frog princes and dragons to the blocks to create our own fairy tale stories.

Next we made watercolor castles in art. We have been working a lot on shapes, so we brainstormed how we could use shapes to make our castles. Then they painted them.

 I'd live there. :)

We re-enacted the 3 Little Bears...

and tried to build the 3 Pigs houses at the sensory table.

 I love these pictures. This group was working cooperatively to build a house and exploring the use of sand to knock it down.

 The would scoop it up in the funnel and watch it cover the house. Playing is learning in Pre-K.

We also read The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka. If you've never read this story, check it out at the library, it's fantastic. After reading it we all decided if we believed the wolf or not. Most of us thought he was lying!

One of our favorite fairy tales was Jack and the Beanstalk. We did a lot of activities about this fairy tale that they loved. The day after we read the book, the Giant left us a note on morning message! ;) We measured things around our room that were bigger and smaller than his footprint.

Then, a beanstalk sprouted in our room!

 "What?! A beanstalk?" It had our kids climbing up it!

 The Giant also left us a copy of his handprint and beans to play games with! We counted how many beans fit into our hands and into the Giant's hand.
 

Busted taking a picture! Haha!

We also played a dice and tally beanstalk game. It took a lot of concentration!

 We also added a Jack and the Beanstalk poem to our journals and then illustrated the story. I mean, how adorable are these journals?

 And how about these guys straightening eachothers ties before picture day? Love.

 That wraps up Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving break!