Flannel Friday: Willoughby Wallaby

I was reminded of Willoughby Wallaby Woo this week and decided it would make a fun flannelboard!

Willoughby Wallaby Woo, an elephant sat on you
Willoughby Wallaby Wee, an elephant sat on me
Willoughby Wallaby Wake, an elephant sat on a snake
Willoughby Wallaby Warmadillo, an elephant sat on an armadillo

You could sing the song, and put one animal at a time on the flannelboard under the elephant, or you could put a variety of animals up on the board to begin with, and then move the elephant around as you sang. The kids could call out which animal they wanted the elephant to sit on next!

Or you could start with the one syllable animals, like the fish, and move along to the multisyllable animals like the alligator (or is it a crocodile?). A great tip for the grown ups is to remind them that when you’re playing around with rhymes, nonsense words are great! Words don’t have to be in the dictionary to help kids learn how words come apart into sounds.

I have been thinking about a Big & Small storytime, so I added in a Triceratops! In the pdf, she is not much bigger than the elephant. I enlarged her 150% on a color copier, and printed her on 11×17 paper, to get her to this size.

(Ed. 11/11: I am no longer sharing my clip art files due to copyright concerns, so I’ve taken down the link to the scans. However, if you search in Microsoft Word clip art you may find the original files I started with.)