Kids love exploring the impossible. As they develop their understanding of how the world works, they find humor in stories and songs that break the rules. Our three year old giggled endlessly the first time we read the book I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. With each new animal he sputtered out, “No! She can’t” between fits of laughter.

I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, published by the Secret Mountain, has beautiful illustrations that captivated Scott from the beginning. This boy has claimed ownership of this book and is very particular about if and when anyone else can read it. The book comes with a CD containing 12 songs, the first of which is I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. There are 16 pages of the book devoted to illustrating this song.

The other 11 songs are included after, each with a 2 page spread of the lyrics and accompanying illustrations. Scott will sit for the entire length of this album and follow along in the book. His favorite of the additional songs is “Sailing Over the Sea” or as he calls it, “The Pirate Song.” My favorite is “Heel, Toe, and Away We Go” about traveling to different places in the world. I always love a good traveling song!

Read and Do: I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

To enjoy the silliness of this story, here’s a fun activity where you or your little one can turn into the old lady and (pretend) eat all those animals! The kids all laughed so hard when I came out in a silver wig and apron. We sang the song together so kids could remember which animal came next. It also allowed us to pause for a little acting when needed. But you could also do it while listening to Thomas Hellman and Emilie Clepper sing it.

I collected a (butter)fly, spider, bird, cat, dog, goat, cow and horse from our collection of stuffed animals and figurines. Next, I spread them out on the table in a random order to further require the kids to remember which came next. After we had all taken turns and it was time to clean up, I put all the animals in a basket with the book that received a lot of play the remainder of the week.

I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly is available on Amazon and in iBooks. The iBooks version has a narration option and includes 2 songs. Scott loved flipping through the book on the iPad. Though he very much loves the hard copy.

Learning with I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

Kids need to hear the same thing again, and again, and again. It’s a necessary part of their learning process. As adults we often tire more quickly of a particular song (Let It Go, anyone?) or a particular book (Good Night Moon, right?) but for our children, these repeated exposures are slowly and firmly building a framework for understanding language, emotions, information, relationships, LIFE! Listening, singing, and reading I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly over and over is engaging for you little one as they see different patterns with each exposure.

Math: Each creature she eats gets progressively larger. Sizes small, medium and large are great preschool math concepts. Comparing them to each other teaches spatial awareness in an abstract way, for example, by asking which is bigger, the spider or the horse.

Science: Animals are a great science topic for little ones. Learning about different animals, how they live, what they do and eat, and then learning about their relationships with each other. Dogs chase cats and cats chase birds which eat insects.

Language Arts: There is great vocabulary in I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Words like absurd and wriggle are fun words to know. As kids are singing this song, they have multiple chances to practice simple words while they are first learning to talk. One kindergarten readiness skill is for children to be able to tell a story in the correct order. Since the chorus of I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly repeats adding one new action each time, this is great practice for remembering the order of actions in a story.

I hope you and your little one have as much fun with this activity as we have had! I’d love to see you or your child dressed up as the old lady.

The Three Little Pigs is such a classic story.

And with a wealth of published retellings, too.

But yet, each new crop of little ones just adores this story. Our kids’ favorite version is our own oral retelling at bedtime. They love it when we use their names as the names of the little pigs. When we added our fourth child, the kids didn’t miss a beat. They insisted we add another pig. The fourth pig’s house is usually made of food, chocolate or candy preferably, and fills the big bad wolf up so he leaves those little pigs alone.

The Three Little Pigs and the Somewhat Bad Wolf, from Scholastic this spring, also plays on solving that hunger problem. Once the wolf is full, he’s not in such a bad mood and is able to play quite nicely with the three little pigs. But what I love most about this version is that when the pigs are sent on their way, they are given money to help make their way in the world. (They are released from a farmer who is retiring to Florida.)

Then the three little pigs must make choices about how to spend their money which leads to variability in building materials. The preschool and kindergarten introduction to social studies is a unit on needs versus wants. I immediately loved this illustration of how different people, or pigs in this case, can fill their needs and wants with the same resources but in very different ways. And since money is also a great math unit for young learners, it seemed a story store was in order!

The Three Little Pigs Story Store

Materials and Set Up:

• bundles of straw (we used grass clippings; it was quite long!)
• bundles of sticks (we have a plethora of sticks lying about our yard)
• rocks and dirt (representing bricks and mortar)
• play money
• your child’s favorite food items
• price tags

Set up the store on an easily accessible table or even spread out a blanket on the ground. Arrange the items and attach the price tags.

How Little Ones Can Help

We gathered crass clippings together and put them in a big pile. The littlest ones in our family also love collecting sticks so this was a fun task for them. The older two helped me bundle the grass and sticks and held the bundles while I tied. The most fun for the girls was arranging the store while Scott loved playing with the mortar and rocks. The kids also helped me decide on prices for various products.

If I try to do all the set up and present them with an activity like this, my little ones are not as interested in it. Plus, I don’t really have that much time where they are engaged in an activity without me that I could pull a whole store together like this one. I’ve tried and I’ always get too frustrated with the process before we get to the playing part. So I decided the whole process is the playing part. That has changed our structured play tremendously! Their creativity flourishes when they are invited to create the set up with me. We all have a lot more fun!

Play Money Ideas

We have play money from our game, Monopoly Jr, or from our toy register in our play kitchen. I also love this idea from Nurture Store to paint numbers on leaves. You can turn fall leaves into money by painting the numbers on the leaves. To keep it simple for little ones, I would paint a 1 on all of the leaves. Then they can just count out the number of leaves they need to buy their items. For older children, you could have some leaves with 5 or even 10 and they can practice making change.