Hand actions for The Wheels on the Bus
Act out The Wheels on the Bus together as you sing. Here are the movements that go with each part:
- Wheels: roll your hands around each other
- Wipers: swish arms side to side like windscreen wipers
- Horn: press a pretend horn with your hand
- Doors: open and close your arms
- People: bounce up and down
What does The Wheels on the Bus mean?
A cheerful song about everything that happens on a bus ride through town, with a sound or movement for each part of the bus. It is an action rhyme, meant to be acted out with your whole body.
Early literacy and speech benefits of The Wheels on the Bus
Nursery rhymes play a foundational role in early childhood literacy. Singing and reciting The Wheels on the Bus helps toddlers and preschoolers develop phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear, identify, and play with individual sounds in spoken words. Children who know nursery rhymes by heart learn to read more easily because they understand the natural cadence, rhyming structures, and patterns of the English language.
What The Wheels on the Bus teaches
The Wheels on the Bus is fun to sing and quietly builds several early speech and reading skills:
- Action words and movements that build coordination
- Everyday words like wheels, wipers, horn and doors
- Sounds (swish, beep) that support early speech
- Turn-taking and joining in with a group
Classroom circle-time and home learning activities
Here are simple, engaging ways to bring The Wheels on the Bus to life in preschool classrooms or at home:
- Read Aloud Karaoke: Use the Read aloud button above to listen to the song line by line, encouraging children to track the highlighted words with their eyes.
- Handwriting & Motor Skills: Click Writing practice to generate a light gray letter-tracing sheet. Children can practice holding a pencil while tracing the exact lyrics.
- Rhyming & Rhythm Clapping: Sing the rhyme while clapping on every accented beat to reinforce auditory rhythm and syllable segmentation.
When your child knows The Wheels on the Bus well, explore our <a href="/fun-games/">fun games for kids</a> to continue building reading and rhythm skills through play.
Where The Wheels on the Bus comes from
This is a traditional American song first written down in the mid-1900s, based on the older English game song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush". It has no single author and is in the public domain.
Fun extension activities
- Line up chairs to make a pretend bus and act it out
- Make up your own verse, like "the babies on the bus go wah, wah, wah"
- Do the hand movements together as you sing
Frequently asked questions
What are the words to The Wheels on the Bus?
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round; the wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town. Later verses add the wipers (swish), horn (beep), doors (open and shut) and people (up and down).
What are the hand actions for The Wheels on the Bus?
Roll your hands for the wheels, swish your arms for the wipers, press a pretend horn, open and shut your arms for the doors, and bounce up and down for the people.
Is The Wheels on the Bus a good learning song?
Yes. Acting it out builds coordination and listening, the repeated lines make it easy to remember, and the everyday words grow a young child's vocabulary.