Sing: Counting Snowmen with the Monkey Mitt

One of the tools I break out of my speech bag of tricks on a weekly basis is Melody House’s “Monkey Mitt.”  The mitt itself is a fuzzy glove, and you can buy sets of puppets to use with it.  The puppet sets come with a card that has fingerplays and activities on it.  

For January, we’ve been using Melody House’s cute snowman set with the Monkey Mitt.  My kids love putting the snowmen on the glove and taking them off as we count the snowmen, sing, and learn rhymes.  Here are some of our favorite snowman songs and activities:

5 Little Snowmen (sung to the tune of “10 Little Indians”)

One little, two little, three little snowmen,

Four little, five little, five little snowmen,

Playing in the snow are five little snowmen,

Oh! Here comes the sun!

Five little, four little, three little snowmen,

Two little, one little, no little snowmen,

Oh! Now there’s no little, no little snowmen,

They all melted in the sun!  

(My kiddos love this song.  We put the snowmen on the monkey mitt as we count up to five, and then take them off as we count down to zero.  We sing the second verse using our best sad voices as the snowmen melt!)

A favorite poem of ours is “Five Little Snowmen.”  The poem is included in the snowmen pack, but I found a sweet printable book for the poem by Cherry Carl on littlebooklane.com.  You can get your own copy here. 

We also sing songs with hand motions frequently during speech and language.  Hand motions help young children remember the words to songs and give children that have limited speech a way to interact during songs.  

Here’s one we enjoy with some easy hand motions:

Little Snowman (sung to the tune of “Freres Jaques)

Little snowman, little snowman (put your left hand out, and near the floor as if showing how high something is), 

Short and fat, short and fat (put both arms in front of you, rounding them as if to show the snowman has a big belly),

Carrot nose and coal eyes, carrot nose and coal eyes (put both hands to your nose and then to your eyes),

Black top hat, black top hat (put both hands over your head).

While singing fun songs, you’ll be working on counting, labeling (body parts and clothing), and giving descriptions!  

Have fun singing!!