Create a "Sing a Song of Sixpence" Children's Activity

With the right preparation, you can create an entertaining and educational activity for “Sing a Song of Sixpence”. Creating an activity provides the opportunity to teach children about rhymes, create an original story, and make worksheets to help students learn the children's rhyme. Using more than one activity helps ensure that the activity works with different styles of learning.

Memorization Activity

Memorization activities help to build language skills and prepare children for more advanced work later in like. Locate a large poster-board, or use a whiteboard to copy the entire rhyme on the board. Divide the rhyme up into four sections and take the children through the rhyme one verse at a time. Cover up individual words of the rhyme with sheets of paper and have the children read through each line while trying to remember the missing words. If the activity becomes too difficult, you can remove the sheets of paper and expose the words the children keep missing. Repeat the activity each day for a week until the children have memorized the rhyme.

Illustrate With Pictures

Give each child four sheets of paper. Write one verse of the rhyme at the top of each page. Ask your children to draw a picture that they feel represents each verse in the rhyme. Then, have the children tell a story about what is happening in each section of the rhyme. Increase their understanding of the rhyme by talking about the meaning of each verse and then have them explain whether the explanation they came up with fits the true meaning of the rhyme to see if they understand. This exercise can help your children associate images with the phrases in the rhyme, develop critical thinking skills, and increase memory retention.

Fill-in-the-Blank

Remove any nouns, verbs, and adjectives from the rhyme and build a create your own story type of activity. Go through the rhyme and ask the children to provide you with appropriate parts of speech for each blank. Once you finish writing all of the missing parts of speech, read the rhyme back to the children or have one of the children read it for you. This will help the children learn the various parts of speech and increase their vocabulary. Have a dictionary and thesaurus available for more advanced students, or if you plan to conduct this activity on an individual basis. Once you're finished, ask the students if the rhyme made sense and compare the two versions of "Sing a Song of Sixpence" to each other.