Finger Play: Five Lovely Starfish

I wanted to share with everyone a really simple but fun fingerplay I spotted in Artsy Toddler Storytimes, which is my favorite resource for planning my 2 and 3 year old storytimes. In that book, this rhyme i sused as a flannel board rhyme but I decided to adapt it as a fingerplay. I like it because it's simple enough I can actually memorize the words. I adapted it on the fly to use some fun vocabulary words that are synonyms for "big" so each verse was a little different.

Here are the words as given in the book:

Five Lovely Starfish
Five lovely starfish sitting on the beach,
Along came a wave and now there are four.
(count down to zero)

So what I did was insert a different word in front of wave like: big, giant, huge, enormous etc. I used my left hand to count and made my right arm a wave with a rolling motion that knocked my left fingers ("starfish") down.