When it comes to nursery rhymes it seems that every little kid knows at least a few nursery rhymes. The reason for this is that as parents we tend to pass down the nursery rhymes that we learned as children to our own children. But what you might not have thought of is that the nursery rhymes that we are passing down to our children provide great activities to help keep our young children active, not to mention these activities are a great teaching tool. But the best part about the various nursery rhyme activities is that you can use them for birthday parties or rainy day activities in addition to their normal uses.
Here are some ideas on the different kinds of nursery rhyme activities that are available.
Nursery Rhyme Party Four Corners:
Materials Needed:
•Pictures of some nursery rhymes
•Music
Directions:
•The first thing that you need to do is to place the pictures that represent the nursery rhymes in four different corners of a room.
•Next start playing some music and let the children run around or dance around.
•Now when the music stops the children need to go into one of the corners.
•Next an adult needs to shout out the name of one of the nursery rhymes and any children sitting in that corner is out of the game.
Jack Jump over the Candlestick:
Materials Needed:
•Construction paper
•Empty toilet paper roll or paper towel holder
Directions:
•First thing that you need to do is to make a candlestick out of the toilet paper or paper towel roll by gluing on a paper flame that you have cut out from the construction paper.
•Next you need the children to line up in a single file line
•Then you need to have each child recite the nursery rhyme and then jump over the candlestick on the last part.
•You can see who jumps the longest or the highest or who has the most graceful landing or you can use this game as a way to get the children to wash their hands.
Bo Peep has Lost her Sheep:
Materials Needed:
•Paper sheep
Directions:
•First thing that you need to do is to get some paper and cut out pictures of small sheep, you can print them off the computer or find them in magazines and such.
•Next you need to hide the sheep around the room, house or outside.
•After hiding the sheep send out the kids to find as many sheep as they can.
•A good variation to this game is to use one sheep and have one child hide it and let the other children find it. And the child that finds it gets to hide it the next time.
Humpty Dumpty Egg and Spoon:
Materials Needed:
Depending on the age of the children involved you can use hard boiled eggs or you can use ping pong balls. You can also use raw eggs but they will make a mess if dropped!
•Plastic or metal spoons
Directions:
•First thing you need to do is place the egg on the spoon making sure it is balanced.
•Now you need to have the children walk up and down the room while balancing their egg.
•The winner of the game is the first child back to the starting point with their egg. You are not supposed to drop the eggs during your trip but with kids it is bound to happen so it is just the first one back.
To make things interesting you can make some kind of obstacle course for the children to maneuver, such as things they need to step over or crawl under.
