Getting Ready for Nursery Rhyme Time

Starting in Feb. I will be posting Nursery Rhyme activities both here and on Totally Tots on Thursdays. Nursery rhymes are a wonderful way to introduce young learners to rhymes and develop phonemic awareness. Did you know that it is a skill to hear words that rhyme? I have been working on getting things ready for this unit and thought it might be helpful to list some of my thoughts and resources that I will be using.

The Books:

There are many different collections and version of Nursery Rhymes. I will mainly be using classic nursery rhymes. If you haven’t read any nursery rhymes for awhile, you might want to pre-read the book versions you will be using. Some of those classic poems might be too harsh or violent (i.e. certain version of the Old Woman in the Shoe say,”She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed,” while other versions say, “She gave them all kisses and sent them to bed.”)

The Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme book by Scott Gustafson is a beautiful, hardback book. The pictures are gorgeous! I’m tempted to tear them out and frame them. My children love to look at the pictures in this book. I do want to point out that one poem included in the book, the Bat, Bat poem, has a picture of a wizard catching a bat.

My Very First Mother Goose is another good beginning collection. Wonderful illustrations. Some of the standard nursery rhymes are missing such as Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Best Mother Goose Ever by Richard Scarry is the book I grew up listening to when I was a kid. Typical Richard Scarry style illustrations.

Sylvia Long’s Mother Goose is another collection that has good reviews on Amazon. I don’t own this version yet but hope to add it to our collection soon.

This week I’ve been printing off nursery rhyme poem pages and sequence cards. Each week I will introduce a new poem (or two) and we will add the poem to our Nursery Rhyme notebooks. Any crafts and other misc. things will also be placed in the notebook. I plan on using the sequence cards in our pocket chart for retelling the rhyme. I will probably be printing off pages from Kizclub too. There are word cards plus coloring pages. Some of the full color pages could be printed on magnet paper and used for retelling.

I also gathered up various odds and ends that go with different rhymes. We will use those objects for retelling and games.

For those who are wondering what rhymes I will be doing— well I never know for sure but here is a partial list to start:

Little Bo Peep
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
Twinkle, Twinkle
Hey Diddle, Diddle
Jack and Jill
Jack Be Nimble
Little Jack Horner
Hickory Dickory Dock

I’ve also been collecting Nursery Rhyme ideas on my Pinterest board. If you have any great nursery rhyme links, leave it in the comments so I can add it.

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