Mrs. Cook's Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Unit

"Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" by Bill Martin Jr. is a wonderful book to introduce the alphabet as a whole. There are so many wonderful activities that can go along with this theme.

Here, my children interacted with the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom CD Rom, which has the interactive story, the story set to several variations of music, games, etc. They really had a blast singing along with the musical story and watching the fun animations! "Let's sing it again, Mrs. Cook!"

We went to the "Chicka Chicka Beach" and pulled coconuts (Easter eggs) out of the pail. Inside of each coconut was a letter of the alphabet. We put the letters in ABC order until we had the entire alphabet. We really stressed how the alphabet consists of letters that make up the words that we read, write and speak with. We also reenacted the "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" story with the coconut tree you see in these pictures. The tree was purchased from Lakeshore.

We made our own Chicka trees by painting our forearms brown for the trunks, our hands green for the palm leaves, and our fingertips brown for the coconuts. I made up and printed the following poem for the students to glue next to their Chicka tree:

I made a special palm tree, especially for you,
To show you letters that I know from "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom."
My fingerprints are coconuts, my hands are the palm leaves.
I used my arms to paint the trunk that sways in the cool breeze.

As I test each student for letter recognition, they will receive a bright colored letter dot (fluorescent garage sale dots programmed with each letter that they know) to place on their palm tree. When they have all of their letters (big mamas & babies) on their palm tree, they get a personalized monkey (with their face on it) on our big
inflatable Chicka tree (purchased from Oriental Trading.)
They just can't wait to get a monkey on the tree!

Another cute idea for this is to let them use the colored letter dots to spell their name going up the trunk of their painted coconut trees.

This is an interactive chart that the children really enjoyed.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!
Will there be enough room?
Here comes ___ up the coconut tree!

A sentence strip is programmed with various letters of the alphabet. I made one with capital (big mama) letters, one with lowercase (baby) letters, and one with numbers 1-10 in random order. It can even be used for shapes, colors, etc.! This really helps with one to one correspondence and recognition of whatever they need practice on! Plus, it's fun!

This is a cute little counting book that we made. The children read each page and glued the appropriate number of coconuts (brown circles) on the tree. The pintables for this book may be found at
Hubbard's Cupboard (one of my favorite Kindergarten sites!)

Here is one of the "cooking" lessons that we had. We made coconuts by taking a round cookie, smearing chocolate icing on, and sprinkling with coconut flakes. We talked about how it was similar to a real coconut in appearance and how it was different. They really enjoyed making and eating this snack! Very inexpensive and easy to do!

This edible Chicka Tree was one of their favorites, as well as one of mine. One of our teachers at Perrin shared this idea with me. Thanks Mrs. Free! It was just so simple and turned out just too cute!

Ingredients for 1 Chicka Tree
4 green apple slices~(Palm Leaves)
3 Cinnamon Sticks (made by Honey Maid)~(Trunk)
3-5 Cocoa Puffs~(Coconuts)
1 Handful of Alpha bits Cereal~(Chicka Letters)

The recipe cards are available in The Mailbox Kindergarten magazine, issue August/September 2003. I made a set for each table to follow along with. Then we mixed up the cards and had to put them back in the right order (sequencing practice). I also had the students try to make their letters go up the tree in ABC order. Then we tried to spell our names with our Alpha bits letters. Of course we had to share and swap letters to get what we needed. What an adorable and yummy snack!

Hint: An eight slice apple slicer makes this activity go much smoother!

This was one of my center activities. The children had to match the magnetic letters to the letters on the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree. I printed the mats from The Learning Leap. Click below for each mat.
Mat 1, Mat 2, Mat 3, Mat 4, Blank Color Mat, Blank B&W Mat

There is also a great little book that we made called "Chicka Chicka ABC" on The Learning Leap website. The children caught on to the text really quickly and loved reading it to each other. Here are the printables:Cover-Page 1
Page 2-3
Page 4-5

Here is the Chicka Tree that we made for our classroom. It is made from a 8' cardboard pole covered in brown bulletin board paper. We then cut giant leaf shapes from green construction paper and hot glued them to the frame of a large umbrella. I then dropped the handle of the umbrella into the hole of the pole and there you have it...
A Chicka Tree!

My Favorite
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Links!

Hubbard's Cupboard

The Learning Leap
(click on Units & Themes)

Mrs. Fischer's Kinder-Garden

Kinderhive

Teaching is a Work of Heart

Back

E-mail