Archives for July 22, 2014

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Nursery rhymes are a fun and simple way to homeschool preschool for free. There are several methods to organize them for the year. The easiest is to just pick from a list each week. You can order them using the alphabet – An Apple a Day, Baa Baa Black Sheep. If you put your thinking cap on, you could sort them seasonally.

A few seasonal ideas:

• Back to School – Mary Had a Little Lamb, Wheels on the Bus
• Fall/Halloween – Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Little Miss Muffet
• Christmas – Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Little Jack Horner, Christmas is Coming
• New Year’s – Hickory Dickory Dock, Months of the Year
• Spring/Easter – Humpty Dumpty, Hot Cross Buns, A Tisket a Tasket

Once you decide which nursery rhymes to study, you will need to search for activities to match your theme for each week. I am using Mary Had a Little Lamb to show you the types of free resources available. I used a 3-step process to find the following links.

1. I browsed through my list of links for Teaching with Nursery Rhymes.
2. I did a board search (not pin) on Pinterest for Mary Had a Little Lamb.
3. I did a Google search for Mary Had a Little Lamb Preschool.

These are a few of the activities I found for Mary Had a Little Lamb:

Trace and color Mary & her lamb.

Print out a sheep in several colors to play a color game.

Act out the story with sequencing cards.

Color and fold a mini book.

Practice pre-writing skills with these tracer cards.

Practice cutting & gluing with this sheep craft.

Play a shape game that is similar to Candy Land.

Combine snack time and craft time by making a popcorn sheep.

Do a letter L hunt with the poem.

Discuss rhyming words and patterns.

I found  few activities for older kids too:

• Poem Sequencing @ Carl’s Corner
• Copywork Packs @ St. Aiden’s
• Word Families @ Enchanted Learning
• Nursery Rhyme Units @ Mrs. Saylor’s Log
• Math & Science in Nonsense Activities

I created a simple 2-page planner to help you keep track of your year of nursery rhymes. It has space for 36 titles (based on a typical school year), and a place for that week’s theme if you are using one (alphabet, season, animal, etc.).

–> DOWNLOAD YOUR NURSERY RHYMES PLANNER HERE <–

Follow my Nursery Rhymes and Stories board on Pinterest

Read all of the days in this series:

Day 1: Learning Lifestyle
Day 2: Nursery Rhymes 
Day 3: Printable Packs 
Day 4: Letter of the Week 
Day 5: Theme of the Week (coming Friday)

Keep up with this series by receiving my posts in your email.

See all of the topics in the iHomeschool Network Summer Hopscotch Series