This morning we started our study of the letter “J” and the color brown with a jungle theme. I was having a hard time trying to decide which animals actually live in the jungle. When I was searching for ideas both rainforest and African animals were shown. I chose to go with African jungle animals for today’s theme.
We started our morning by reading the book Jungle Bullies
Next, we made Jungle “J” papers. I cut out “J’s” from brown construction paper and the children glued them to blue paper and added construction paper grass and leaves. They got some scissor practice because I asked them to make little snips in the green construction paper to make it look like grass prior to gluing it on their paper. No one cut all the way through the paper, so I would say their scissor skills are improving. We also taped on a piece of green yarn to serve as a vine. (Can you tell my son was in a “blue” mood today?)
Then they colored a jungle animals coloring page I happened to find at a site that no longer exists. You can just do a search for jungle animal coloring pages and probably find something.
I cut the animals out and the children glued them to their papers. As you can tell from the pictures we had blue, pink and rainbow colored animals. 🙂 If I were to do this again I would make the background paper horizontal. That way there wouldn’t be stacks of animals in the air. 🙂 I also could have added a pond and maybe a rock. Oh, well. I do like the monkey swinging from the vine, and the kids seemed to enjoy this activity.
I found the following songs at Everything Preschool. The children had fun singing these with me. The second song was harder for them to learn the lyrics, but they liked it anyway.
The Animals In the Jungle Say
(Sung To: “The Wheels on the Bus”)
The parrots in the jungle say squawk, squawk, squawk,
Squawk, squawk, squawk, squawk, squawk, squawk,
The parrots in the jungle say squawk, squawk, squawk, all day long
The monkeys in the jungle say ooh, ooh, ooh, all day long.
The monkeys in the jungle say ooh, ooh, ooh,
ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh,
The monkeys in the jungle say ooh, ooh, ooh, all day long.
The tigers in the jungle say grrr, grrr, grr,
grrr, grrr, grr, grrr, grrr, grr,
The tigers in the jungle say grrr, grrr, grr, all day long.
I’m a Little Monkey
(Sung To: “I’m a Little Teapot”)
I’m a little monkey in the tree,
Swinging by my tail so merrily
I can leap and fly from tree to tree
I have lots of fun you see.
I’m a little monkey watch me play
Munching on bananas every day
Lots of monkey friends to play with me
We have fun up in the tree.
To finish our jungle themed day I got out a jungle play set my son had received for Christmas one year. I set the animals out for the children along with some play dough. They had a lot of fun feeding and playing with the animals. This was also a good activity for helping them understand more about taking turns and sharing since we had to divide up the animals to give everyone the same amount.
Just because they are mine, their names start with “J” and they were having so much fun, here are my little guys playing with the play dough and jungle animals. 🙂
We had a good time with our jungle “J” theme this morning. Check back tomorrow for a frugal and fun idea.
