B4FIAR: Bear Hunt Story Sequencing

It took my son weeks to get over the We’re Going on a Bear Hunt book.  He love it even more when he saw Michael Rosen’s video version. He’s been singing it 24/7! The very first thing that we did for the B4FIAR unit was to sequence the story in the book. 

First we read the book together.  Then we read it the second time, but as we do I would pause and ask him what was the first thing that the family encountered as they hunt for the bear, then what happened next and so on. My son would get confused between the mud, forest and snowstorm, but he can clearly describe each event.  Say, instead of saying ‘mud’, he’ll give me the “thick oozy mud”. 

 

Surprisingly, he can match the description with the picture.  But of course, we’ve been doing this activity for quite sometime now and he must have memorize it already.

The second time we did the activity (he asked for it!), I made each picture an a object to make it more “realistic”.  As seen on the pictures below, I made a grass, river, mud and cave out of construction paper.  The snowstorm, I added bits of styrofoam on the picture representing snow and for the forest, I made trees out of pipe-cleaners and construction papers.

      

Boy oh boy! He looooveed this bear hunt world!

And I was really touched when he told me that there should be a family.  He said "Mama, where’s the family?”  So I made him a picture of a family.  In the picture I was the only one who’s not wearing a hat, so he insisted that I should also wear a hat.  I told him I cannot wear a hat, but he want it so badly that he added a hat on my picture, as you can see below.

                        

And he positioned everything, including our miniature bear.  Oh he was so delighted!

That night, he displayed his work on the window to preserve it for his Daddy to see.

I will be posting more bear hunt activities.  So stay tuned! 

P.S.  I do not own these printables.  I’ve downloaded this story sequence printable a long long time ago and I forgot the source.  If ever you own this or came across the source, please do let me so I can add credits to this post.

B4FIAR: Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina (Part 2)

Mavi is 36 months old.

As a continuation of our B4FIAR for Caps for Sale, we did crafts, math and science after our language lessons . For math, I relied on the the packs which I downloaded from the site I mentioned in my pervious post.  Then I added some patterning activities using homemade materials.

ARTS AND CRAFTS.  We did tree painting and attempted to put monkeys on it too!  During our activity, I showed him how to create a simple tree using brown color for trunks and branches, and green for leaves.  As we go along, I would describe how I execute my strokes.  After which, I encouraged him to do the same.

                                    

But he was eager to do something different using his fingers.  Picture above is showing my son making a turtle hehe.

Below is a painting of my son’s version of a tree.  He did the trunk and branches and put a small amount of leaves on it.  Then I finished his work by adding more leaves.

MATH.  We read the book once again and while doing so, I made him arrange the caps according to the color that was mentioned on the book.  Again, the file was from the B4FIAR packs of Homeschool Creations (see previous post for the link).

        

Then I introduced the concept of patterns.  This is something new for him as he wasn’t interested with patterning before.  And I was surprise that he liked our matching activity this time and even asked for more!  All pattern materials are homemade (you can send me a PM if you want the file).   The graphics in the pattern file were just taken randomly via Google image.

Here, we did a pattern match.  So happy that he finished this activity in a minute.  But I was kind of disappointed that it didn’t challenged him a bit.

Next we did some “follow the patterns” activity. He was very keen on how he will position the patterns and made sure that he gets them right.

      

Below is a coin counting activity that my son enjoyed the most. To make it more “Montessorish”, I made him use some play coins for counting.  So instead of him counting the ones on the card, he counts as he places a coin on top of the picture on the card.  We use a wooden peg which I bought at a craft store nearby.

      

SCIENCE: PARTS OF A TREE

These activities were not supposed to be part of our B4FIAR.  I was preparing this for our “trees” theme activities  but decided to add it to our B4FIAR curriculum because a “big tree” is mentioned on the book.

So here’s what I came up... a tree puzzle made from felt sheets.  Totally forgot where I got the pattern... promise to add a link once I find the source.  I put labels so my son can familiarize himself with the different parts of the trees.

 

Mavi was very very excited for this material.  He loves puzzles and he kept asking me if he can do the puzzle all by himself.  See how he position the branches :)

     

We made use of the 3-part nomenclature card (homemade) for parts of the trees.

Inspired by this post, I made a matching game of tree shapes.  The graphics were all sourced from the internet randomly.

      

And here, we further discussed the parts of a tree by doing paper crafts.

 

Well there you go... our very own B4FIAR for Caps for Sale.  To end this post... here’s my little one pretending to be the peddler and balancing a throw pillow on his head :)