Caitie is sharing tips for using the preschool song “One Potato, Two Potatoes” in the classroom and at home for lots of fun learning with little ones. She has lots of great ideas! And she’ll lead us through the song using gestures – an excellent way to introduce a song to children. “One Potato, Two Potatoes” is a simple counting song that also explores singular and plurals.
Try these ideas in the classroom or at home!
- This is a great song to review some simple counting. Encourage your students to count along with the song. You can count on your fingers, point to numbers written on the board, or count along with real life items like potatoes!
- For a simple counting activity, cut out circles from brown construction paper to be the potatoes. You can have more than seven to review more numbers, and count them as a group. You can write a number on the board, or simply say a number, and have your students count out that many potatoes into a pile.
- This song is also great to use as a simple choosing rhyme. When you have to pick a student in the class for an activity, or if you have a number of things to choose from, you can use this rhyme and point at a different item or student for each potato, and the last thing you point to on “more” is the lucky chosen one.
- Try making up a silly potato dance to do with your students, where you count and move like a potato as you sing.
- For more active movement, try giving your students flashcards with the numbers and potatoes on them and place them in order in a row from one to seven. Then have your students stand in a line and as you sing, jump from number to number. At the end of the verse, go back to number one and jump some more! To make it a bit more challenging, mix up the cards and lay them down out of order so your students have to jump back and forth as they sing. If you have a lot of students, pick one or two using this song as a choosing rhyme, and have them jump while the rest of the students sing the song.
- This song can also be a simple way of introducing singular and plural. Often multiples of something are represented by the letter ‘S’ at the end of the word. One potato. Two potatoes. Singing this song can help students recognize those sounds that represent one of something, and multiples of something.
- To keep this choosing rhyme fun and fresh, you can always change the word potato to be anything at all. Try bananas, papayas, pianos, or flamingos!
More resources for this song (1)
