Nursery rhymes are fantastic tools to teach literacy and numeracy skills together with a bunch of other skills, to young children. Preschool and Kindergarten age kids are going to love this 5 Little Monkeys Activity.

Nursery Rhyme Activities for Kids

• Roses are Red Violets are Blue Activity
• 5 Little Snowman Rhyming Activity
• Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Name Recognition Activity
• Farmer and the Dell Rhyming Bin
• Hickory Dickory Dock Telling Time
• Five Little Monkeys Activity
• Printable 5 Little Monkeys Reader

5 Little Monkeys Activity

Do your kids know and love  5 Little Monkeys Activity as much as mine? It is such a great nursery rhyme for younger kiddos. Here is an activity to go along with the rhyme, practicing counting and fine motor skills too!

Although there is a version of five monkeys in a tree with an alligator, we are more familiar with this version that goes like this:

Five Little Monkeys jumping on the bed, one(1) fell off and bumped his head. Mommy called the doctor and the doctor said: “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” Four little monkeys jumping on the bed…

 

• FREE monkey printables from Growing Book by Book or these here
• 5 craft sticks
• A small-ish box for the bed
• Paper to cover the “bed”
• Marker
• Glue

Print and cut the monkeys and glue them onto the craft sticks. You can laminate them first if you want it to last longer:

Cover the box so that it represents a bed. Make 5 slits in the box, big enough for the craft sticks to fit, and number them. You can do this randomly like I did, or, in a line.

Now it is time to play! First, let your child add the monkey sticks to the corresponding numbered holes. Number recognition and fine motor skills are at work here. 

Then, recite the rhyme and remove (in order) a monkey each time the rhyme says “one fell off and bumped his head”. This rhyme teaches subtraction as we start at number 5 and deduct one each time a monkey falls off. With these monkey sticks, subtraction becomes real as this nursery rhyme is being played out. 

More fun rhyming activities you might like: 

• 5 Little Monkeys Counting Book (pictured above)
• Nursery Rhymes Tot Series
• Sing a Song of Sixpence Activity
• Little Bo Peep Counting & Writing Numbers
• Ordering Numbers One Fish, Two Fish…