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Nursery Rhyme Theme

 A few years ago when I pulled out Nursery Rhymes to read to my class, I discovered many of them had never heard these stories before.  I grew up on Nursery Rhymes so this was interesting to see. We dove into a unit of Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales and they loved it! This is also a great unit to really focus on rhyming with the children. Blocks, pool noodles, and cups can be used in STEAM challenges to build castles and towers. Straw, sticks, and rocks can also be added to use in building houses when you read "The Three Little Pigs."

 We create our own Nursery Rhyme book where the children illustrate the rhymes and then get to take their books home to share.
 The students love collecting the pigs and returning them to their pens. We use pink balloons and hula hoops.
 We also try to be as nimble and quick as Jack and jump over our own candlesticks.
 "The Three Little Kittens" lost their mittens but we play a matching game with ours.
 This is also a great unit to focus on story retelling and sequence because the stories are usually short and engaging. The stories can be acted out by the students themselves or with puppets or other toys.
 After reading "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" we sort bear manipulatives by color and by size.
"Little Miss Muffet" encourages us to learn about spiders and their webs and we measure webs with linking cubes or other objects from our math center. "The Three Little Pigs" also bring this activity to our day-each child tries to see how far they can blow a straw, a stick, and a rock.
Just about any Nursery Rhyme or Fairy Tale will work but these are some of my favorites:
*"Humpty Dumpty"
*"Mary Had a Little Lamb"
*"Jack be Nimble"
*"Hey Diddle Diddle"
*Hickory Dickory Dock"
*Little Miss Muffet"
*"The Three Little Kittens"
*"The Three Little Pigs"
*"Goldilocks and the Three Bears"
*"Three Billy Goats Gruff"
*Rapunzel"

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