Read It. Move It. Share It. is a collaboration with Kerry from Picture Books and Pirouettes. Once a month Kerry recommends a book for me to use in my creative movement classes. Then I write a post on what I did with the book and how I used it with my students in hopes of giving you some new ideas to use in your classes! Here is the February book. Enjoy!
I love the Hokey Pokey! It’s one of my favorite dances to do with my littles. It seems like all ages love this song and dance and it never gets old. This month Kerry recommended The Croaky Pokey and I was so excited to try it out. I tried this book with my grown-up and me classes which are ages 2-3. They loved it! Here’s what we did!
First we did the original hokey pokey dance. Identifying body parts like hands, heads, elbows, belly buttons, knees, feet, and whole bodies. For this age I do not sing right and left because they do not know their right from their left yet. So I just simply say put your hands in and your feet out. It’s less confusing and they can do it independently that way which is what we want anyway.
After that we looked at the pictures in the book and sang the frog version. My favorite part is the end where it says “hop the croaky pokey as we chase the fly around, right in the froggy’s mouth!” I had the adults be the flies and the dancers had to hop like frogs to chase them. So funny! 
I love the version in the book, it’s so creative! So, I thought I would use it as inspiration and try to explore different parts of animals to do the hokey pokey. For the frog we added in the tongue! We also came of up some other animals to debut and it was really fun for the adults in the room too. They were helping me come up with parts of each animal to sing.
The Hippo: “put your nose in, put your nose out, put your nose in and wiggle it all about.”
The Peacock: “put your feathers in, put your feathers out, put your feathers in and wave them all about.”
The Tiger: “put your tail in, put your tail out, put your tail in and shake it all about.”
The Penguin: “put your flippers in, put your flippers out, put your flippers in and slap them all about.”
You could explore any animal and insert it into the song. It also encourages exploring different action words such as slap, shake, wave, and wiggle. Get creative and see what words you can come up with! Don’t forget to pokey right over to Kerry’s post to learn more about this book and get some other ideas!
p.s. Happy Leap Day! Don’t forget to encourage lots of leaping today!
Maria Hanley is an independent early childhood dance educator in New York City.
Maria serves on the 
Hi Maria! I love your blog and this idea is great. Do you have any advice for stopping the little ones from going overboard on the “oooo-oooh the Hokey Pokey” part? My group can get a little excited and start bumping and pulling the circle around!
Hi Annie, do you have then hold hands when you sing it? I usually have them do it solo and give the cues before I sing the part. So like… “now turn around” …”do the the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around” does that help? You could also try to use a prop. Sometimes I use hoops and have them put the body parts inside and outside the hoop. That could help them focus on something and help calm their excitement.
This book looks so fun! I love doing the hokey pokey with my little ones too! thanks!
Yay Jill! Hope they like the book too!