Kids Get Crafty: 5 Little Ducks went Swimming One Day…

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Welcome back to Kids Get Crafty time for an easy Preschool Craft! In particularly an Easter Preschool Craft! This week we have a very simple and fun craft for you.. it has already provided hours of fun in our house – these little 6 stone ducks! It all started with a walk on the beach. We collect 10s of stones and dragged them home… once home, what do we do with them?! I like crafts that you can play with, i.e. they don’t end up just “standing around”, filling your house and collecting dust. So to Red Ted’s delight, I suggested making “Five little ducks, that went swimming one day”.

I decided to make them different sizes, so that we also have a “sorting” game – sort by size, by weight and counting them all… one of our stones is quite small. So please *take care* with younger children. If need be, make them all larger and the same size!

Easy Nursery Rhyme Rocks - 5 little ducks - make these easy Duck Rocks - perfect for singing along to 5 Little Ducks, as well as counting practice and ordering by size for preschool #preschool #toddler #rocks #stones #ducks

Our stone  ducks were first published in March 2011 and have been updated and republished for your convenience!

I also think, that these make a lovely little “Easter” craft. After all, our ducklings look a little more chick like that duck like! Not that it matters, of course!

The Book… or

Well, there are number of books you can buy relating to “5 Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day”.  Just type it into Amazon and take a look! But today is a “Sing & Make” session… sorry, for those who were hoping for a book!!!


This is so ridiculously simple, you will wonder why you hadn’t thought of it sooner…

Materials: lots of stones, though you only need 6, white & yellow paint (we used acrylics, but you could use other paint and then varnish it, OR do the “hot stones & crayons” trick), tab of red and black paint

1) Sort your stones by size: you will need 6! And it would be great if you could get stones that “stand up”.  Two of ours don’t but Red Ted doesn’t seem to mind.

2) Paint one white for the mum, 5 yellow for the little ducks. This is the tricky bit: how do you persuade a 3 year old that you can’t paint them ALL white, or ALL yellow or ALL green? Two tips: firstly, show them this post – I find if Red Ted knows what we are making – i.e. can visualise the result, he is more likely to follow instructions and secondly, have more stones on hand, that the 3year old can paint to his/ her heats delight!! You win. They win!

3) Let dry. Once dry, you may need to touch up the paint a little on the spots where the stone was resting.

4) Once try – add tiny eyes and a line for a beak – we found “simple is best”. Red Ted was dying to stick on his oh so favourite Googly eyes… but the small stones were too small. So we didn’t. I think they look nice.

All crafts welcome in the link up party!!

Stone Ducks

But.. what crafts have YOU made out of stones? And what traditional nursery rhymes and songs have you turned into games? I would love to see them all!

For more Kid’s Craft ideas, click here for a full list. See all of our Easy Preschool Easter Crafts here: