Introduce your preschoolers to Bo Peep with this Little Bo Peep nursery rhyme printable. You’ll get a full version of the poem and sequencing cards so your kids can learn the rhyme and practice its retelling.
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Little Bo Peep Nursery Rhyme Printable
Some of your students will already be familiar with Little Bo Peep and her missing sheep, but for some this will be their first time hearing the rhyme.
Little Bo Beep tends to be a fan favorite with preschoolers. Those sheep are irresistible, and kids love the simplicity of the poem (and learning about the inspiration behind the Toy Story character)!
Grab your own set of Little Bo Peep printables at the end of this post. This is a small taste of a full Little Bo Peep preschool printable pack! Read on to find out more.
How to Prep the Printable
To get started with the Little Bo Peep nursery rhyme printable, print out the 2 pages: poem and sequencing cards.
You can leave the poem page as is, and cut the cards apart. These are the re-telling of the poem that the kids will be using to recall the sequence of events.
After printing, laminate the printables to keep them in tip top shape. You can place the poem in a dry erase pocket if that’s easier, but I prefer to laminate the whole set so it lasts for years.
Using the Little Bo Peep Printable with Your Students
This is how I like to use the poem and sequencing cards with my students, but don’t let this limit you. Any way you can think up to use these printables is fair game! In fact, I’ll give you a few more ideas further down.
Read Little Bo Peep aloud to your students. After you’ve read it once by yourself, encourage the children to echo your words. You say one line and then point to them so they know to repeat the line back to you.
Once the children pick up on the rhyme, encourage them to say it along with you! Repeat it a few times with them to help them memorize it.
The retelling cards are for, well, retelling Little Bo Peep! And they will be a great tool to teach and practice sequencing.
Model how to use the cards with the whole group the first time. Use a pocket chart and show the children how to place the cards sequentially to retell the rhyme.
You might even have children hold each of the cards as part of sequencing practice. The kids can work with you to put the various parts of the poem in order.
Recite the rhyme together, and then let the children work as a team to place the cards in the correct order in the pocket chart. You can help as needed, of course.
Once the children are comfortable using the retelling cards, you can place them in your literacy center. Your students can bring the cards out for independent practice or practice with their peers.
Extension Activities
As I mentioned, I like to use the nursery rhyme printables in different ways. Here are some other ideas you can try with this Little Bo Peep nursery rhyme printable:
- Encourage the kids to reenact the poem. Acting it out helps reinforce their memory of the poem and its separate components.
- Pair the cards with play dough. The children can create each of the scenes using the dough. (Fluffy play dough sheep will be adorable!)
- Hang the cards up in your art center to inspire some nursery rhyme art. Have them illustrate the retelling of the poem.
- Use the poem as part of your classroom or individual poetry journals.
- Add the kids’ names to the nursery rhymes if at all possible. This makes it even sillier and even more fun for the children. For example, instead of “Little Bo Peep . . .” it could be “Little Eric peep . . .”
- Challenge students to underline words that rhyme with a dry-erase marker.
Those are just a few additional ideas. Do let me know if you’ve come up with your own way to use the poem and sequencing cards!
Little Bo Peep Nursery Rhyme
This is the version of Little Bo Peep you will get with the printable. As with all nursery rhymes, this may be a different rhyme than the one you are used to! Nursery rhymes, as we know, were first passed along orally, with the result that there are hundreds of different versions.
Little Bo Peep is pretty old, dating back to the 1500’s, and shows up in written form starting in the early 1800’s. Shakespeare even mentioned Bo Peep, in King Lear, in reference to a children’s game.
The full version of the poem is said to contain a moral lesson about avoiding Little Bo Peep’s downfall: falling asleep when she was supposed to be watching her flock of sheep, and consequently they all wandered away.
Here is our version of the rhyme:
Little Bo Peep has
lost her sheep,
And can’t tell
where to find them.
Leave them alone,
And they’ll come home,
Wagging their tails behind them.
Little Bo Peep Books and Videos
And now for some books and videos you can use to enhance your Little Bo Peep teaching! This is a good time to remind the kids that nursery rhymes tend to have many different versions floating around.
This first video is a fun animated version that cleverly weaves Ba Ba Black Sheep into the action! Check out my Baa Baa Black Sheep activity if you want to practice this poem with your kids first.
Here’s a lively video of Little Bo Peep in song form. It has a real sheep in it who goes on a big adventure while Bo Peep is rappin’ some jams!
This is another singing version of Little Bo Peep, but this video includes the ASL signs as well:
Books! There are plenty of Little Bo Peep books to accompany the printables and videos. Here are some to get started with. I like to have a few different versions of nursery rhyme books to show kids the different rhyme styles.
Little Bo Peep Preschool Lesson Plans
Planning meaningful lessons for students week after week, all while balancing other teaching responsibilities and a personal life, can be a daunting task. That’s where Preschool Teacher 101 comes in to save you time!
We offer a wide variety of themes that are frequently used in preschool classrooms, as well as some less common (but super interesting) themes. Click on the image below to learn more about our Little Bo Peep lesson plans!
Free Little Bo Peep Nursery Rhyme Printable
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