World Nursery Rhyme Week will be held from 14th to 18th November 2022.
Nursery rhymes are important for children's language acquisition and to support their speech development. They introduce new words; they can teach rhythm, rhyme; they can be useful for mathematical concepts... The list goes on. And, of course, they're fun! Singing nursery rhymes together can be a great bonding and social experience.
World Nursery Rhyme Week 2022
World Nursery Rhyme is an initiative started by Music Bugs. During the week, children learn and sing a nursery rhyme a day. This year, the nursery rhymes are:
The Big Ship Sails
12345 (Once I Caught a Fish Alive)
Five Little Speckled Frogs
BINGO
Twinkle
We've got printables for each of the nursery rhymes and some ideas for activities that you could do each day based on the rhyme.
The Big Ship Sails
- Learn all about different modes of transport and then have a game of transport bingo.
- Encourage turn taking by playing a game of memory with these transport game cards.
- Have a go at learning how to draw a ship.
- Get the playdough out to to use with a ship playdough mat.
- Play rhyming games. Which words rhyme with ship?
- Look at a calendar and find the last day of September.
- Look at some pictures of different types of ships. What are they used for? Who works on ships? Have the children ever been on a ship?
- Put lots of transport toys out to play with.
12345
- Check children know their colour words with a game of fish colour bingo.
- Support children's turn taking skills by playing some fish games.
- Support the development of pencil control by colouring in some fish pictures.
- Read books that feature fish.
- Practise subitising and counting with some finger peg cards.
- Visit an aquarium (or pet shop) to look at lots of different types of fish.
- Help children to develop their pincer grip and fine motor skills with a lovely sequinned fish craft activity.
Five Little Speckled Frogs
- Learn all about the life cycle of a frog to introduce some new vocabulary.
- Play a fun animal sounds game which helps to develop social and listening skills.
- Practise cutting and sticking by completing the frog picture.
- Think about the beginning sounds in words and write an acrostic poem about frogs.
- Use props or pictures of frogs to aid with counting and taking away.
- Visit a pond and try pond dipping. Depending on the time of year you go, you might not see any frogs. But, you will see lots of the bugs that they like to eat.
- Try making a frog mask for the children to use in their role play games.
BINGO
- Look at pictures of farms and learn some new farm related vocabulary with farm word cards.
- Invite children to talk about their own pets. Compare the different types of pets everyone has.
- Choose some dog colouring pages and have a go at a dog bookmark craft.
- Dogs are very popular in children's books! Have a look at the library to see how many you can find.
- D is for Dog. What other words can children think of that begin with d?
- Find out more about looking after dogs and the different types of service dogs. You could visit a pet shop or have a visitor to talk about dogs and their different jobs and roles in society.
- Make wooden spoon dog puppets. The children could make up a story about dogs and put on a puppet show.
Twinkle
- Talk about what stars are and that they are in space. What else can we see in the sky? What is our nearest star?
- Learn a little bit about astronauts and space. You could start by learning about the International Space Station and learn about astronauts' lives in space.
- Talk about the importance of sleep and how it feels when we are tired.
- Practise using scissors with some cutting stars.
- Encourage mark making and writing with some pretty star outlined paper.
- Measure and weigh out the ingredients to make these cinnamon bread stars.
- Make a cute star and moon mobile.
