After the fiasco of last week, and our Hey Diddle Diddle craft, I decided to step back from our nursery rhyme book and go for super simple for our Apple Nursery Rhyme craft. It may not be quite as satisfying to me, but this way the kids and I aren’t butting heads, which makes for a calmer homeschool preschool day.
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Apple Nursery Rhyme supplies
printable (over in the subscriber section join my newsletter), markers, glue, tempera paint, your nursery rhyme book
Apple Nursery Rhyme craft
This one is super duper easy.
1. Cut out the poem first and glue it to the top of your page. I’m working on the kids noticing that book pages go in a certain order, and they should glue the next poem on the next page. They didn’t care. They just glued it down randomly. So, we’ll have a blank page or two, and that’s okay.
2. Color the tree and its leaves. Of course the more color you put on the tree the better? Right…… Okay, so that’s my kid’s belief. Notice Superman actually did a pretty good job keeping in the lines. Also, his tree is completely blue.
3. Now cut out the tree and the leaves, and glue them together.
4. Now for the fun part. Get a small bit of red paint. Stick your finger in it, and put 3 dots on the tree for the three apples.
Super cute, and super easy. Of course, I had to do Superman’s apples, because he’s on a whole don’t touch the paint kick, but aside from that, it went well.
Taking the apple poem craft beyond a craft
First, this is a great example of a counting down poem. It’s a great way to practice subtracting one.
If you want to make this into a multi-page mini-book, then you could glue each stanza on a different page, and write out the subtraction problem.
If you are doing this with kindergarten or even up to first grade you could talk about rhyming. This is arranged in rhyming couplets, tree/me and could/good.
Then to keep your even older kids involved, have them look at the meter.
I first learned this nursery rhyme as a fingerplay with only two little apples. It’s a great way to get wiggly little kids to sit down as they shake down their apples and put them in their laps.
I was amused to find a whole slew of versions of this apple poem all over. The number of apples changed from version to version, anywhere from four to two apples. I think I even found a version with one apple. I ended up choosing the classic two apples version for the finger play, but if you’re using this apple nursery rhyme for subtracting one, then use the four apples version.
Apple books
I was going to add a couple of book suggestions to the post (says Future Ticia 2023), but I realized I have an apple booklist because this was part of a whole apple unit. So I’m just going to send you over there so you can see what else you can do with apples (not too surprisingly it involves lots of cooking and eating apples).
Oh my goodness. If you read my posts next week, you will learn that C is also on that don't touch the paint kick. We tried apple prints today and he flipped out when he got a tiny spot of paint on his hand.
This looks like a lot of fun. It's too funny that your twins are so different in what they like.
Great craft and love the poem! B would like that. He doesn't like to get paint on his hands either. =)