Mindful Monday
This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories.
Hopefully by now you have noticed that I like to incorporate many various learning modalities and content areas into each lesson. I wanted to share a few lesson ideas on nursery rhymes today. Nursery rhymes are rich in vocabulary and their rhyming words are an excellent way to prepare children for reading.
I had the children create art using a pumpkin cut out to relate back to the rhyme “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater.” Some of the details they added were amazing. Even the mutli-hued pumpkin I added near the poem was created by cutting out paper painted by the children. Various shades of orange paint had been left out for the children to use and when they were finished I simply cut out a pumpkin shape.
During story time we read many different rhymes. We retold the story using a story board. This allowed the children to work on their recall and gave me the chance to ask more in-depth questions including those awesome “why” and “what if” ones.
Then we had fun with egg shapes! We used egg shapes to work on shapes first. We pretended to put Humpty back together again by matching the shape that had fallen out with the shape missing on the egg. While matching shapes we talked about the various attributes of the shapes which is an awesome early math skill.
We also used egg shapes to work on math. The children were presented with the problem of putting Humpty together. First we had to ensure that we had all the missing pieces to Humpty Dumpty so we counted out the pieces we found. After we were sure we had all the pieces we put Humpty back together again. This worked on our number recognition, one-to-one correspondence and overall number sense. The problem solving involved (do we have all the pieces, do they fit, etc.) also built up critical thinking skills.
At the end of the week we participated in a Nursery Rhyme Olympics. We had activities such as rolling (to roll like Jack and Jill) and jumping (to jump like Jack over the candlestick). I love incorporating gross motor any time I can. I made sure we had movements that engaged various parts of the body, crossed the mid-line, and engaged both balance and coordination. The kids had a blast and learned too!
What types of activities have you used for nursery rhymes? Do you usually use them as a unit of study?
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