Film Friday – Little Bunny Foo Foo

In first grade we learn the actual “Little Bunny Foo Foo” song/fingerplay first and work through it during a couple different class periods.  I make sure that students know my actions and my version of the story quite well before we move on.  If you’re not familiar with “Little Bunny Foo Foo” check it out on YouTube.  It’s a great fingerplay song and perfect for young kiddos.  You can really play up the bad bunny who should know better and the good fairy who tries to get him back in line.  This is one of my favorite fingerplays because you can get really dramatic with it and it starts kids down the road into descriptive storytelling and poetry.

I found a book adaptation of the famous song, written by Michael Rosen where little “rabbit” foo foo goes a little further than little “bunny” foo foo.  Little bunny foo foo only scoops up field mice and bops them on the head.  Little rabbit foo foo bops the field mice and then goes on to bop some tigers, wriggly worms, goblins and goblins too.

We start by reading the book and then if we have time at the end of class I pull out this video adaptation.  They think that the book version of the song is great but they really love the video and animated rabbit foo foo.  Once we’ve watched the video the fun part is to get kids to think about what details of the video were different from our original version.  If you ask them some critical thinking questions, you can easily get students comparing and contrasting and thinking about how things transfer from the song to the video.  How did the lyrics change?  Did characters show up that weren’t in the original version?  What alternate words did they use?  The kids love discovering the changes and then want to watch it again!

Here’s a link to the book (currently) on Amazon.  You can find the book in a lot of different places and I realized that my school library has a BIG copy of the book to show to students.