Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed

For this lesson, I started off by having the boys color this printable that I found on teacherspayteachers.com. (I cut the monkeys out in advance.) After a minute or two of coloring, we sang a few songs and then I read Five Little Monkeys three times. The first time I read it the boys just sat and listened. The second time I read it the boys acted it out with simple actions (holding up their fingers, rubbing their heads, calling the doctor, etc.). The third time I had the boys act it out with their printable monkeys/beds. (After each monkey fell off we asked the boys to count how many were still left on the bed. Easy way to integrate some subtraction skills!)

I found this YouTube video that I thought would be fun but Karli suggested that we let the boys dance to this Baby Genius version of Five Little Monkeys. The boys are pretty easy to please so I was game for anything! We let the boys dance around and then transitioned to the next activity. I took a 12-cup muffin pan and set up a fine motor, sorting activity with one boy on each side of the pan. (I would've used muffin tins if I had any but we were fresh out.) Five tins had a numbered piece of paper in them, 1-5. The sixth tin had 15 pom-poms in them. The boys used plastic tongs to sort the pom-poms and put the correct number into each tin. My description of this is pretty awful so hopefully a picture will help make sense of what I'm explaining.

Definitely the ugliest sorting activity I've ever seen. Pinterest would be ashamed. 

After the boys sorted their pom-poms, we finished with a monkey handprint craft. Thank you, Google search, for the awesome idea!