Brown
Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?
by
Bill
Martin, Jr.
Illustrated
by Eric Carle
Favorite
Activities:
·
Animal
Puppets - Make the animals in the book out of construction paper using exact
colors, purple cat, blue horse, etc; then laminate and attach a tongue
depressor. After the children are familiar with the story, pass out the animal
sticks to the children. As you read the story, children will interact with
their animal. For example, the child with the brown bear will come up at the
line, Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you see? I see a purple cat looking at me,
and then the child with the purple cat will come up, continue this, until the
end of the story. As children become familiar with this they will take on the
role of the questioning and answering for his/her own animal.
·
Alphabet
Book - This one came from
·
Pumpkin,
Pumpkin - Around Halloween or during October I have the children make a
book called “Pumpkin, Pumpkin, What do you see?" Since I teach
kindergarten, I encourage the children to use their invented spelling and
pictures for each page. We cut the books out in the shape of a pumpkin and the
children usually use Halloween characters for their book, but since I leave it
up to them, I get all sorts of great ideas from them! Each child has their own
book and their parents love it when they come home and read it.
·
.Book Patterns - I
also have teacher made big books based on the pattern for Halloween, Christmas,
the ocean, and a few others. This pattern lends itself to any theme.
·
Halloween
Book - One of our favorite class books is one that we do at
Halloween. When all the children are dressed in their costumes, I take a
picture of them, individually. We glue each picture on a page in the book, with
the words
__________,___________ Who do you see? I see __________ looking at me. In the
blanks, we name the character that each child is dressed as. The children go
back to this book all year long, recalling the costumes, and reading the text.
·
Story
Extensions - Here are a couple of ideas for Brown Bear, Brown Bear that I
took from Pat Cunningham's book, Classrooms That Work. After reading the book
several times during shared reading, write each word on individual cards or
sentence strips cut to size. Ex. Take one of the pages from the book like "Brown
Bear, brown bear, what do you see?" and write each word from this sentence
individually. Then the kids can
practice "being the words" while you read the
book together...matching their words with the text in the book. Then you can
put some of these same word cards (laminated of course), along with baskets, or
cans marked 1-8, in the Math center, and explain to the kids to take a card and
count how many letters are in that word then place in the appropriate numbered
container. Have the children work with a partner, one counts while the other
checks, then reverse roles.
·
Class Books - We make several books through out the year
with the brown bear pattern. The most read is made with Xerox copies of the
children’s pictures using their names. We also have made White Ghost, White
Ghost for Halloween. I also make small individual books with different colored
bears I see a (color) ________bear. We also have a picture of Brown bear that
we paint with cocoa.
·
Dramatic
Play - My children always like to act out the story. We use sentence
strip headbands for the different animals - the children can help make these if
you aren't committed to realism - the children made the ears of the animals and
paste them onto sentence strips, which are then stapled to the correct size. The
color and name of the animal can be written on the sentence strip if you want.
Some years the children have worn necklaces with just the color word hanging on
them - I usually write the color word in the actual color for the beginners.
·
I Went
Walking by Sue Williams - it is good for predicting because the
illustrations show the tail of the next animal and the children love to guess
what's next.
·
Author Study - Eric
Carle is the illustrator. After reading the book, have the
children study the pictures closely, and discuss how they think the
illustrations were made. Show them other Eric Carle illustrations and
talk about the wonderful ways he uses paint and other materials. Have
them choose which animal they would like to recreate. After the painting
dries (usually the next day) and with the child's permission, cut the shape of
one of the animals out of the painting. All of the animals displayed
together make a striking bulletin board display!
·
Bear Sort - We use
the Lakeshore bear counters for sorting by size and color, and for
counting. I put the bears out along with a work mat that has Large,
Medium, and Small houses in the four bear colors (Red, Yellow, Green, and
Blue). The kids enjoy sorting the bears into the houses.
·
Class Books - We make
many class books, but this is by far the classroom favorite. I use our
school digital camera to take a picture of each of the children early in the
school year, then use the pictures to illustrate our book What Do You See?
The first page might have a picture of "
Website
Resources:
·
DLTK
Printables - http://www.dltk-kids.com/books/brownbear/
·
Eric Carle
Website Ideas - http://www.eric-carle.com/bb-bb.html
·
The Virtual
Vine - http://www.thevirtualvine.com/brownbear.html
·
The Kinder
Hive - http://www.kinderhive.net/brownbear.html
·
A Bear Hunt
Webquest - http://www.davidson.k12.nc.us/webquests/hunt/hunt.htm
·
Kinder
Critters Free Printables - http://www.kindercritters.com/freebies.htm#brownbear
·
Hubbard’s
Cupboard - http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/brown_bear_brown_bear.html
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