It's Raining, It's Pouring Lesson

Lesson Focus: "Ing" words, rhyming words, scissor practice

To start the lesson I taught the kids the poem It's Raining, It's Pouring.  The kids particularly liked the part where the old man is snoring.  They had lots of fun showing me their best snores.

After we went over the poem a couple of times, we talked about "ing" words.  We briefly discussed that putting "ing" at the end of a word puts it in present tense (e.g. snore - snoring).  I had the kids identify the "ing" words in the poem.

We then found all of the rhyming words in the poem.  We had already discussed rhyming words, so the kids were pretty quick to find them.

Rain Stick Craft

Materials Needed:

• A roll of toilet paper (one per child)
• Aluminum foil
• Rice (or something to make noise in the stick)
• Scissors (one per child)
• Rubber bands
• Elmer's glue
• Pencils
• Construction paper
• Crayons, markers, glitter glue, etc.  

How to Make the Rain Sticks:

• Have each child bring over their toilet paper roll or give them one if you didn't assign them to bring one.  
• Let the kids pick out the color of paper they would like for their rain stick.
• Have the kids trace around the end of the toilet paper roll.  They need to do this twice.
• Then have them draw a larger circle (about 1/2" bigger) around the circle they traced.  
• Give them scissors and have them cut out the big circles.
• Then, have the kids cut from the edge of the outside circle to the edge of the inside circle multiple times so it looks a little bit like a sun.  (Make sure they don't cut into the middle of the small circle.)

• Glue along the bottom edge of the toilet paper roll.  Place the paper over the end of the toilet paper roll and fold the cut edged up onto the glued part.  Then place multiple rubber bands around the glued area to hold it in place.  (Hopefully you can see what I mean from the picture above.)  

• Get a piece of aluminum foil about 1 ft. long and 2" thick.  Crumple it up into a large snake.  Then fold it in half and twist the two ends like a rope.  (See the picture above.)  Put the aluminum foil inside the toilet paper roll.  
• Pour in the rice.  
• Then glue around the top end of the toilet paper roll, fold the paper around the glue and place a couple of rubber bands around that end as well.  
• Let the kids decorate their rain sticks.  
• Tip and shake the sticks and make some rain! 

This craft was a big hit in our preschool.  Give it a try and leave a comment.  I'd love to hear from you!

You Might also Like:

The Frog Prince Lesson 

The Farmer in the Dell Lesson

Humpty Dumpty Lesson