Doctor Foster Nursery Rhyme Stones

This month I am sharing ways in which nursery rhymes can be used with young learners of English, either at home or in the classroom. I have used Nursery rhymes with babies and children up to about eight years old. Check out some of the benefits of learning and singing nursery rhymes from this post. 


For Doctor Foster, I began by downloading these free images from the Music Bugs website and followed the instructions on how to make these lovely tactile story stones. I left them on the living room coffee table ready for my girls to discover them after school (my girls are 5 and 8 years old).

After the discovery, they quickly put the stones in order and instinctively sang the song while tapping each stone. This was repeated several times.

Doctor Foster
Went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He stepped in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never went there again!

We then took the idea from piccolo music (as part of the free resource) and held hands in a circle and skipped around while singing the rhyme. On "puddle", we splashed into an imaginary puddle.

My eldest wanted to know where Gloucester was, so she had a look on google maps and found it in the UK. At school, she is learning about the points of a compass so we then imagined that Doctor Gloucester wanted to go to London instead. Which direction does he need to go in? East. We continued following directions to other major British cities; Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh etc.

For the rest of the evening we played little literacy games renaming the doctor to rhyme with a city, for example Doctor Flundon went to London (the doctor also became a she!).

Both children continued singing Doctor Foster over and over again throughout the evening.The stones have been put into a nursery rhyme prop basket for future use.

Main Language Aims
singing a nursery rhyme
recognizing and making up rhyming words