5 Little Ducks

Teachingtinytots blog has a wonderful reading theme each week. This week the theme is the Five Little Ducks. If you'd like to join in the fun see my link at the bottom of this post.

*The first thing we did was to make some fun mama and 5 baby stick puppets. My printer is out of ink, so I drew the mama duck and her five babies by hand. However, First School has a great mama and baby ducks to print out. I used their printables as a guide for my drawings. The First School site template is for a felt board but we made stick puppets. Simply cut out the mama duck and 5 little ducks out of construction paper. Next, let your tot glue on some feathers. Finally tape a dowel rod or popsicle stick to your ducks. For the mama duck I added a cardboard square for some extra support. Then, act out the song or book using the stick puppets. This whole project was a HUGE hit with my daughter. We started by listening to a cd that has The Five Little Ducks song and then looking at a book of the Five Little Ducks.

*Next, we visited some YouYube videos featuring the 5 Little Ducks Theme. Here are the ones I liked-

Story Time Felts and Cullens Five Little Ducks Story Time; And this one also.

* Our next project was to make a duck feet painting. You simply put some yellow paint onto a paper plate and dip spatulas to make webbed footprints. This idea comes from Childfun. (Just a hint: If your child has a play spatula, this works better than an adult sized spatula).

*Cornmeal Ducks was really surprisingly fun! This idea also comes from Childfun. We almost didn't do this project and I'm so glad we did. Start by drawing a duck on construction paper and cut it out. Next apply glue to the duck and sprinkle it with cornmeal. Until this project, I had never thought about how similar the consistency cornmeal is to dry sand, so it was such a sensory experience. Let it dry and then remove the excess cornmeal. Now it will be gritty to touch like sandpaper. Zhana loved touching her duck. To take the sensory experience even further, we painted the ducks on top of the cornmeal.

*Next, we used the kitchen sink as a water table. I added a whole bunch of water and rubber ducks.

* Finally, we made duck potatoes stamps. Simply cut the shape of a duck into a potatoes, dip into paint, and voila you have a stamp.

I wanted to listen to a song of the Five Little Ducks while doing this theme and checked out a fabulous cd from the library that I wanted to tell you all about. I got the cd only because it had The Five Little Ducks on it but LOOOVVVEEE the whole cd. It is called Children's Songs by Susie Tallman. I guess I'm not the only person who loves it because it has received theOPPENHEIM PORTFOLIO GOLD AWARD. Listen, I don't usually like kid cd's that much. I really like this one a lot. After my daughter fell asleep, I kept listening to this cd if it tells you anything.

Teaching Tiny Tots Link to the 5 Little Ducks Reading Challenge: http://teachingtinytots.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/5-little-ducks-reading-theme-challenge/