We're heading to Fairyland in the East Bay later this week, so we've been having fun talking about Nursery Rhymes to get us prepared to meet some nursery rhyme characters. Today we focused on Humpty Dumpty... my little guy's favorite.
Materials Needed: foam sheets (we used brown and pink), markers, cotton swab, black marker, Elmer's glue, painter's tape, and felt circles.
Directions:
1. We taped off the bottom half of Humpty so that my little guy would only paint his pants... and then we'd keep his head white.
2. Paint! We wanted our Humpty to have really colorful pants 🙂
3. Add circles with a marker for the eyes.
4. Add felt circles for the center of the eyes (these are more felt circles from the bottom of chairs)
5. Let dry
6. Pull off the painter's tape.
7. Color a cotton swab with dot markers or regular markers and glue it on with Elmer's glue.
8. Cut out legs and arms from foam (I pre-cut these) and glue them on.
9. Let the arms/legs dry.
10. Build a wall and put Humpty on top.
You can re-enact the story again and again using your Humpty Dumpty paper plate puppet. The only thing that wasn't realistic with our story was that Humpty didn't break his crown. We didn't want to rip or hurt our cool puppet. If you have time, you could make two puppets (one with and one without a broken crown) to help you with your re-enacting. We repeated the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme over a hundred times while we painted and created. It is just too fun to say again and again!
Why are Nursery Rhymes important to know?
Great question! There are so many kids that don't know nursery rhymes these days. Some parents consider them to be silly and some parents were never exposed to them growing up... so they can't teach them to their kids! They can be helpful for language development, teaching reading skills, teaching math concepts, fostering creative dramatization, and providing comfort and support.
This article called Rhymers are Readers: The Importance of Nursery Rhymes very clearly explains some of the benefits of teaching nursery rhymes to children. Definitely check out it out.
If you have a moment, head on over to our Toddler Approved Facebook page to join our discussion and let us know what your favorite nursery rhyme is. If you have an activity or nursery rhyme themed craft, post the link too. We'd love to check it out!
My 2 and 3 yrld sons love Humpty Dumpty rhyme so they had a blast creating this paper plate version. I helped too by taking red paper and black paint with a wide foam paint brush to create a brick wall. I was out of painters tape so to hide the uneven line between egg head and pants, we cut and glued on a paper belt for Humpty.
This is very very nice to my young ones, Asante!!!
WHAT! I did not know you had a blog, Kristina. Why didn't I know this? I'm adding it to my reader even though I don't have a toddler to approve it. 🙂