Thank you, Literature Pockets! (Nursery Rhymes)

Yet another happy rant about this big, fat eBook (Literature Pockets:  Nursery Rhymes), which we’re still chugging our way through.

Today, I want to kiss it (but it’s a PDF, so I can’t without wetting my hard drive) for being SO brainless and easy that I can accomplish it even on a day when EVERYTHING is difficult.

This week’s poem (song) is Sing a Song of Sixpence, and it always amazes me how many of what I’d consider important rhymes of childhood I have simply failed to expose my children to.

I guess I figure they’ll pick them up somehow, but here they are, 3.5 and 6.5, and they’ve just never heard it before.

For this poem, we did two activities:  a cut n’ paste where you stick the king in his counting-house, the queen in her parlour, the maid outdoors to hang laundry, and a little blackbird in the last scene to nibble her nose (it’s kind of a horrid poem that way); the second activity involved creating a construction-paper “pie” with blackbirds inside. 

(see how Naomi Rivka dressed Gavriel Zev???)

The PDF gave instructions for a “class project” where you set up a giant pie and each child creates one bird for the class pie.  Instead, I mounted the individual birds on construction paper and attached them with string inside the kids’ mini-pies so they could fly out and peck our noses if they want.

Anyway, the activities were not all that challenging, but they were just right for a day like today, when I couldn’t get up much and I am often distracted by pain or numbness.

In addition to the materials for the Literature Pocket, I found a free PDF printable mini-book to go along with Sing a Song of Sixpence and printed that in case anybody wanted to colour it. 

Fat chance; my kids apparently hate colouring (the three purple dots on the birdie here are as much as I could get out of Gavriel Zev).  But someone’s kids might… you can find more nursery rhymes at that site as well.