Lessons and Activities

A STEAM Lesson for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

04/26/2017 by Shakara Hill Leave a comment

I’m willing to bet that all Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers have the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and if you don’t have it in your classroom, you’ve probably read it before. It’s usually a teacher’s first choice for introducing letters at the beginning of the year, but did you realize it is a great book to engage children in a STEAM challenge?

Take a look at a how my featured Excellent Educator, Heather Williams, re-shopped this book using her creativity!

Hi guys! I’m Heather Williams, a Pre-K teacher from Warner Robins, Ga. I teach at Central Georgia Technical College and I’d like to share one of my lessons with you.

We participated in a STEAM activity to “reshop” one of our classroom classics: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

For this activity we used the following items:

  • 6 Wooden Cubes
  • Large Popsicle Sticks
  • Plastic Letters
  • Green Paint (Optional – To color the popsicle sticks)

To begin, we reread the book and as we were reading, we practiced identifying some of the letters of the alphabet.  After that, we gathered some materials and stacked the wooden cubes to form a tree.  We then placed the popsicle sticks on top to create the leaves and branches.  We pulled the letters a through z from the basket of magnetic letters.  We took turns identifying a letter and placing it on top of our tree and placed as many letters as we could, until the tree toppled over and spilled all the letters! We discussed different ways of how we could successfully get all of the letters on top, without them spilling. Eventually, after some adjustments by the students, we were able to get the entire alphabet on top of the tree, and even added extra letters! This is a simple STEAM challenge activity using materials I bet you have already in your classroom, and I’m sure your student’s will love it just as much as mine!

Pictures are all taken at CGTC Early Childhood Learning Center

 

Try out Heather’s ideas and share how you make this work for you! Let you students have fun with it and experiment  with different ways to do this activity as well.

If you have a great idea that other teachers can benefit from (I know you do), I encourage you to submit your ideas here. I’d love to feature you and your creativity next!

 

HAPPY TEACHING!