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Hey Diddle Diddle, the cat and the fiddle…the cow jumped over the moon. It’s a quirky nursery rhyme that doesn’t even make much sense. No one is sure of the exact origins. J.R.R. Tolkien even uses parts of the nursery rhyme in one of the songs in Lord of the Rings.
We were inspired to do some activities for this nursery rhyme when the boys were given this book:
We love Ed Emberely’s books. They’re so easy and simple to follow, anyone can draw using them. He uses simple shapes and lines to show how to doodle different things. We also have Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book of Animals and Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World
There’s some mornings where we’ll just sit and draw. Malcolm can follow most of the directions fairly easily, and I love to doodle scenes with them.
There’s a page in this purple book that shows how to draw the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle, the cat and the fiddle.” I drew some illustrations and made a little book for the boys using the directions.
There are lots of great activities around the web for Hey Diddle Diddle. Here’s a fun little printable booklet you can make from the KidZone website. We used this to make Sean a little book to play with.
And this site here has printable coloring pages for this and lots of other nursery rhymes.
After we did some of these activities we had some fun running around!
Hey Diddle Diddle the cat and the fiddle – Pretend to play a fiddle
The cow jumped over the moon – Jump up high
The little dog laughed to see such fun – Laugh outloud
And the dish ran away with the spoon – Run around in circles.
The boys favorite part was getting to act out the rhyme. We did it probably 10 times in a row, and they kept saying, “Let’s do it again!”