Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Lesson Ideas

My sister, a kindergarten teacher, gave me the idea to have my son take some rubber letters we have and match them up to the letters on the pages of the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom story. You can do this with your child or student as you read the story, or have them do it on their own after you have read the story together. It is great fun and really helps promote letter recognition, hand eye coordination and sequencing. If you don't have rubber letters, you can also use magnetic refrigerator letters or purchase some of the letters shown below.

Another great idea you can use at learning centers in your classroom or at home is to take a cookie sheet and make your own coconut tree from construction paper and tape in to the surface of the pan. This serves as the Chicka Chicka tree from the story. Next gather you alphabet magnets and have your student place each letter on the tree as it appears in the story. Children enjoy this as it allows them to relive the humor of the story. They can take their fingers and rake all the letters down from the top of the tree as it gets too heavy to hold them, like in the story.

Another fun activity for your young learners is to hide a set of magnetic letters in an indoor sandbox for the little ones to find. This sandbox can be made from a 2lb. bag of rice and a plastic tub. Add a spoon as a scooper for digging. As your student finds a letter, they stick it on the pan with the Chicka Chicka tree and then write the letter down on a piece of paper. This activity is a fun way to encourage young children to practice writing their letters.

The great thing about these activities is that they can be easily made from items around your home.

There are several fun Chicka Chicka Boom Boom snacks you can make with children that are sure to bring a smile to their faces. The first is a simple recipe using chocolate wafer cookies, green apple slices, red grapes and Alpha Bits cereal. All you need to do is arrange them on a plate to form the Chicka Chicka tree and watch your child devour them. Add some learning fun by having your student or child call out the letter sounds as he/she eats them.

Another great snack for kids who aren't allergic to peanut butter is to take a celery stalk with the leaves still on the top, smear the stalk portion with peanut butter and sprinkle with Alpha Bits cereal.

A great variation on the Rice Krispy marshmellow treats is to substitute the rice cereal with Alpha Bits and Coco Puffs and make Chicka Chicka Boom Boom marshmellow treats. The coco cereal looks like the coconuts on the tree and the alphabets are the climbing letters.

The last great snack idea I have seen involves using orange segments for the tree branches, celery and peanut butter for the trunk of the tree and Sesame Street organic alphabet cookies for the letters climbing the tree.

*I have had trouble finding Alpha Bit cereal, so I recently used some alphabet cookies I found at my local Trader Joe's grocery store.

One of my favorite Chicka Chicka Boom Boom crafts is to use finger paints and paint your student's fore arm and hand in brown and green. The child then stamps them onto white construction paper forming the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree. The letters on the tree can be added in one of three ways. You can have the child stamp the letters with colored stamp pads or paint, place alphabet stickers on the Chicka tree, or write the letters with crayons or markers.

Another sweet craft is to create the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree by taking a toilet paper roll and painting it brown. To this tree trunk your child can add tree branches cut from green construction paper. Coconuts can be simple circles cut from purple construction paper to match the color in the storybook. For the final touch, add alphabet stickers you child or student can use to climb the tree. The fun links below offer coloring pages and other crafts and games you can use to extend the learning possibilities.

Children love repetition, so it is a good day to repeat the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom story several days in a row with your students throughout your unit study. To add some fun and rhythm, you should consider playing the CD or the Scholastic video of the story so the kids can learn the song that goes with the story. Before you know it they will have memorized and and you can sing it as your kids conga line around the room.

You will want to visit the Link above for some great Chicka Chicka Boom Boom printables. There are games and activities listed there. One activity you can do is to have your students play the memory game Concentration. Use letter tiles or alphabet flash cards and have children find matching pairs of identical letters or match up upper with lower case letters.

To encourage phonetic awareness, have your children take turns drawing a letter from a hat. The child then must say the letter and its sound and find something in the room that begins with that sound. If they can't find something in the room, they may simply name something that begins with that sound.

A fun but messy idea is to have the children practice writing letters in shaving cream on a cookie sheet. Too messy for you? Fill a zip lock bag with 1/4 a cup or less of glue mixed with food dye. Be careful not to overfill the bag so that there is room for the kids to write with their fingers on the mixture. Be sure to seal the bag with tape so it doesn't leak. The mixture can be used again and again.

For math learning you can count the letters of the alphabet or try including the book Chicka Chicka 123 in your unit study. As with the letter sorting activity above, you can also use magnetic numbers to match the numbers in the story. This book also provides the opportunity to practice some skip counting with you students as the numbers in the story begin skipping up to 100 at one point.

Art and math can be combined as you color by numbers with the printable found on my favorite link with the big arrows above. There are also other great printables like roll a Chicka Chicka Tree where your student uses a die to roll numbers that allow him/her to draw pieces of the tree. This can be played alone or with another student to see who finishes their tree first.

Below are some fun classroom products for Chicka Chicka 123 as well as a link to a printable math mat for skip counting by 5's.

*If this information has been helpful, please consider supporting me by purchasing one of the above items.