Passover “Felt” Stories, Songs and Rhymes

Stories, songs and rhymes are a wonderful way to introduce or review holiday symbols, themes and elements. And there are so many possibilities for Passover that also help encourage literacy and math skills while reviewing the elements of Passover!

I love working with felt pieces—the material is soft and sensory pleasing, it’s interactive, and it’s relatively easy to make creations yourself since it doesn’t fray and can be attached with a glue gun. But not everyone wants to make their own felt pieces and some are a lot more complicated than others and that’s ok! I’ve put together faux felt pieces just like I did for Hanukkah—all you have to do is print them out and laminate them! If you don’t have a laminator you can use contact paper. Or, if you don’t care about being able to reuse them a bunch of times, you can just use fresh out of the printer.

What you’ll need

Felt
Glue gun
Scissors
Passover “Felt” Stories, Songs & Rhymes printable
Scissors
Laminator (or contact paper or nothing at all!)
Velcro dots or tape

Putting It Together

1. To make real felt pieces cut out the shapes of the items you want to make and glue them together with a glue gun! It’s that simple! However, you’ll notice I was not confident in my felt skills to make all the items I wanted for my songs and rhymes. So make what works for you!
2. To make the faux felt pieces, print out the Passover “Felt” Stories, Songs & Rhymes printable.
3. Cut out the pictures (leave the lyrics intact for later!).
4. Laminate the pictures, then cut them out. If you don’t want to laminate you can use contact paper. Or you can leave them just as paper but they won’t last for multiple uses.
5. Add Velcro dots to the back of the laminated pictures if you want to use them on a felt board. Otherwise you can make your own faux felt board by laminating a piece of construction paper and using tape loops to attach them to the laminated paper like I did for our Hanukkah faux felt board.
6. Invite your kiddo to your real or faux felt board. Start with whichever song or rhyme you wish from the lyrics in the printable. Add your pieces to your board as they come up in the songs or rhymes. You can adapt the invitation to focus on certain words, counting, or elements of the Passover story or seder.

Finished & Loving It!

We love working and playing with real felt! My kids’ preschooler teachers use(d) it a lot so they are familiar with singing, rhyming and telling stories while adding felt pieces to the board.

Their teachers also like to hide some pieces behind others to encourage the kids to guess where the hidden item is by identifying the objects in front by name, color or number. All this is amazing literacy practice! And for my preschooler this helps so much with his speech language goals of identifying colors and practicing articulation.

Many of these songs and rhymes will also work well with math practice. Some are more easily identifiable than others, like the Five Seder Plates. But in any rhyme or song you can incorporate counting if that’s something you want to work on.

You can of course practice all these skills, as well as review elements of Passover, by making faux felt pieces. The real felt may be more sensory-pleasing but it’s not necessary. I was not about to try to make Pharaoh and all those frogs out of felt! The printed version worked wonderfully and still allowed us to sing and enjoy the process, as well as remind us about the frog plague.

My kids and I went through all the included songs and rhymes first, then we went back and did specific ones they wanted to repeat. I then of course let them do some free play with the pieces because they all work for imaginary play as well!

Extension Activities

You could introduce this activity with a Passover story (check out our favorite books in our Bookshop.org shop). You could also include discussion or learning commentary before or after each song or rhyme. For instance, you could discuss the ten plagues before or after the frog song. You could review the plagues in order or emphasize the severity and suffering that was a result. For today, we just focused on doing the activity itself without additional commentary and that’s fine too!

If you’re excited to start playing with felt but want to purchase some quality pieces My Felt Story has a bunch of options for Passover (and more!) and Made By Ilyssa makes a gorgeous Passover Seder plate.

Are you a felt fan? Have you tried faux “felt” stories, songs, and rhymes before?