Educational Preschool Activity: M is for Monkey

Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed is a book that has been getting a lot of play time around this house. When it finally reached the renewal limit at the library, it was a sad day for all. Thankfully, my son got the book Eight Silly Monkeys the very next day at his birthday party! So the monkey jumping fun continues!

My two year old daughter loves everything about these crazy monkeys — she loves reading the books, loves singing the song, and she even managed to download the Five Little Monkeys app on our kindle all by herself (apparently, we need better parental controls on that thing!) So of course, she went bananas when Kelli created this Monkey Printable to go along with the book! (Download yours for free by clicking on the link below!)

There’s all kinds of preschool activities you can do with this one. Counting is an obvious choice. You can also talk about same and different. My little chipmunk is a big fan of coloring everything in a monochrome palette, but you could encourage your little one to use two colors and then match monkeys of the same color.

Once glued onto the bed worksheet, you could talk about “up and down” or “high and low”. There are more monkey-themed activity links found at the bottom of this post. But for now, let’s get started!

Table of Contents

What You Need:

Free Monkey Printable
Coloring tools (crayons, markers, etc)
Scissors
Glue

What You Do:

Have your child color the monkeys and the picture of the bed.

Once they are finished, you could practice scissor skills by drawing a dotted line circle around each monkey. If your child is too young, simply cut out the monkeys yourself.

I opted for roughly cutting around the monkeys instead of in every nook and cranny. You could also make two copies of the monkey page and glue the little fellas on Popsicle sticks for some puppet fun! Using the puppets, your child could retell the story to work on reading comprehension or you could sing the song together.

Finally, glue the monkeys onto the bed! My daughter loves the glue stick, so this was her favorite part. If you want to get really fancy, you could add those Velcro Dots to the back of the monkeys and onto the bed worksheet so you can retell the story over and over again.

Finished!!

What About You?

What book did you turn into an afternoon of fun? Leave me a comment and tell me all about it!

More Monkey Fun:

Clothesline Monkey Alphabet Activity from Making Learning Fun
Barrels of Monkeys Coloring Matching Game from Making Learning Fun
Five Little Monkeys in a Tree Song and Printable from Scholastic Printables
Five Little Monkeys in a Tree Puppet Fun from Ramblings of a Crazy Woman

About the Author

Lindsey Whitney is a mom of two, home day care provider, and blogger over at Growing Kids Ministry. Growing Kids Ministry is a blog designed to help parents, teachers, and Children’s Ministry workers who want to help the kids they love grow in their faith. You can connect with her via twitter or on facebook!