Well I must apologize... I went on a bear hunt and got lost!!!! Sorry it's been so long since my last post. Just don't know why life is been handing an overfilled plate that I just can't ever see the bottom. I will try to do better as I love to post what we do in our child care. I'm not scared! With this book I didn't find the amount of resources I was able to with the others... so I guess I was a little scared. I must say my children love, love, love this book. Did I say they loved the book?!? It is such a fun book to retell, act out, sequence... and did we have fun! So here it goes... Morning Meeting I love doing the morning meeting (otherwise known as our circle time). And I love putting up an interactive message to the children that we can share ideas, review a concept, or whatever. Here is a sample of a few we did while covering this book. Shared Reading Our shared reading time was a lot of reading the book and watching the video. I don't think these children ever will get tired of this story. So we did a lot of inferring predicting, fluency (repeating or reading along with me), and comprehension. We watched this video... which by the way is wonderful as it brings the book to life! We also talked about real vs. pretend. What in the book could be real and what probably wasn't so real. We sorted bears... real ones vs. pretend ones. You can download this game here. And our companion poem was "Five Little Teddy Bears" Five little teddy bears standing in a line. The first one said, "I'm feeling fine". The second one said, "Let's go and play". The third one said, "Let's play all day!". The fourth one said, "Let's run and run and run". The fifth one said, "Isn't preschool fun?" Letter of the Week I try to incorporate a letter of the week and complete a letter book with my children. The letter book is an engaging way to recognize the letter and the sound, reinforce the hands-on activities that we do, and the parents love reviewing them with their children (at least many children over the past years of doing letter books have told me so). We learned letter Bb this week. Here is the cover of our Bb book. We used dot markers to fill in the letter Bb's. We matched upper and lowercase Bb's and then sorted the upper and lowercase Bb's. We put dots with our dot markers on all the letter Bb's on this page. You can't tell my children enjoy using dot markers! We matched bears by color and identified the letter Bb's as we matched. We colored bears the color indicated. We colored the uppercase B (known as big B) and then helped uppercase B find lowercase b (known as baby b) by staying in the path. We colored lowercase b once we found him. On the bottom of the page we colored bears with letter Bb's in them brown. Here we found the picture that was different and colored it to identify it was the different one. A good pre-reading skill for children to have. We colored in all the Bb's in each row and then put together a puzzle in which we matched the letters that spelled "bears" to make the puzzle. We talked about how bear meant one and bears means more than one. When they finished the puzzle we found out how many bears were in the picture. On our last page we traced letter Bb's. They didn't do bad for just turning 3. Working on those fine motor skills. A shape matching page is missing. I must have forgot to take a picture but it is included in the download. You can download my whole letter Bb book here! Activities We sequenced the story many times and many ways... here are a few of the ways we did it. You can find this wonderful sequencing printable here. We used the 3-D cards from here and some toys to sequence the story. The children had a lot of fun with this. You can get the cards from here. We also colored a sequence page... but I forgot to take a picture of it. I found my sequence sheet in my resources so I can't share it. We did some patterning... We patterned bears with our bear manipulatives. You can download the pattern cards here and use with what ever manipulatives you have and for whatever lesson as they are very open-ended. We did some more math... We rolled and dotted the bear with the same number. We did some painting... We fingerpainted bears and then made these fun pictures using real pictures of themselves, the fingerpainted bears, a black cave, and their own drawings. I also had them dictate a response to, "If ____ saw a bear, he/she would ___________________." A little more painting... We finger painted a paper plate, we dot marker-ed one egg carton piece to make these fun bear masks. We learned about bears... We talked about bears, we connected a dashed line to make a bear, and then used three-part cards to match pictures and words to the right bear. You can download my three part cards here. We made a book... We made this bear hunt book through the week from here. We learned the concepts of over, under, and through... We did an over, under, and through obstacle course. That about sums up what we did that I have pictures for. Hope you enjoyed our Bear Hunt! Up next will be "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves". Hope you will stop back! Best, Rose

"I just want to kiss and hug my bear!" exclaimed one of the kindergarten students. For real, me too. They look so soft and fuzzy. But they're not. If only we could snuggle up to a polar bear. I would be selfish to keep all of these adorable bears to myself. So I'm sharing... This is a super easy art project for kids at any age to experiment with chalkboard chalk. They can create and learn soft and sharp lines with smudging and smearing. These kindergarteners (80+) had such a blast with this art project. I loved it because they ALL created amazing polar bear faces and are artists in practice! Whatever we can do to get them to think, draw, cut, and glue - super good skills for any age. Here's what you need: black construction paper (main paper) white chalk small piece of black (nose) pencil scissors permanent marker hello there! Using the chalk, (try to use most of the paper with the face) DRAW A LINE starting near the bottom and all the way back down to create the head (we called it a full rainbow or upside down U). Then add the EARS on each side, same U shape. Next use the FLAT SIDE of the chalk to fill in the head and ears. Take your finger and SMEAR the chalk inside the head and around the edges to create a smooth and fuzzy surface. Draw little circles for snowflakes/stars and then smear a little bit to appear glowing. Next draw a triangle for the nose, round off the tips, cut out, and glue. With a permanent marker draw details for the eyes, ears, nose and mouth (a little jingle). Adorable Fuzzy Polar Bears Aren't they cute? I love kid art skills. Happy Bears

Lots of free and fun teddy bear songs and rhymes for circle time. Teddy bear songs, other fun not-real-animal bear songs, and silly bear songs for toddlers and preschoolers.