We celebrated Mother’s Day in the pre-K class this week. We read a book called Bist du meine Mama? about a little chick that goes looking for its mother. It was perfect, because they were actually hatching chicks at school!

The book takes place on a farm, so first we reviewed our farm animals and what they say. The children love to hear the different animal sounds, especially ones that are very different, like the frog that says “quak” like our English ducks!

• das Küken sagt “piep-piep”
• die Katze sagt “miau”
• der Hund sagt “wau-wau”
• das Schwein sagt “oink-oink”
• die Kuh sagt “muh”
• der Frosch sagt “quak-quak”
• die Henne sagt “gack-gack”
• der Hahn sagt “kikeriki”

I have several sets of farm animal word posters. Sorry there isn’t one easy document for this story! And even though there isn’t a horse or a duck in this book, I’m including those, too.  You can download them here:

• Hund (PDF)
• Katze (PDF)
• Schwein (PDF)
• Frosch & Hahn (PDF)
• Henne, Schaf, Kuh, Gans, Küken, Traktor (PDF)
• Pferd (PDF)
• Ente (PDF)

They look like this:

Songs about animals or the farm have been hard to come by. And I couldn’t really think of a song about a mother that would work. These songs in the pre-K class have to be very, very simple! So in the end, I thought of doing a lullaby 🙂 We sang “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf” and I had the children do simple motions with it:

• Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf  –  pretend to sleep
• Dein Vater hütet die Schaf  –  use arms to “gather” the sheep & then pretend to hold a sheep
• Die Mutter schüttelt das Bäumelein  –  hold arm up like a tree trunk with the hand as the branches and wave the arm & hand, as if the tree is shaking
• Da fällt herab ein Träumelein  –  hands slowly “rain” down a soft dream (think “Itsy-Bitsy Spider rain!)
• Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf  –  pretend to sleep again

They really enjoyed it. And – bonus! – it also settled them down a bit 🙂

We ended with our book, Bist du meine Mama? by Christiane Hansen (Oetinger, 2006):

Then I sent them home with a coloring page: Alles Liebe zum Muttertag (PDF)