Brown Bear, Brown Bear

I love Eric Carle and the kids do, too!  We have a Bear unit that we teach-typically about the third week of school.   We start with Brown Bear, Brown Bear for color word recognition and story sequencing. 

Our team has taught this unit for several years but I did get some fresh, new ideas from my friend, Suzan at http://krazyforkindergarten.blogspot.com/. 

Like this one!  We color story cards and usually glue them onto a sentence strip in story order.  Suzan uses a Story Bag so that's what my class tried this year.  You place the story cards in a brown paper bag decorated with a Brown Bear picture.  The children then use their story cards to tell the story. They loved this-we had story cards all over the carpet but they all made sure they had every picture to put back in their bag.  They were serious about it!

We learned the poem, Brown Bear Happy.   Each child gets a copy of this poem to include in their Poetry Journal.  We circle punctuation in orange, rhyming pairs in green and sight words in blue.  I got this idea from http://www.jmeacham.com/ who has printable poems all ready to copy.  Jessica has so many wonderful ideas.  I also made Homework Bags for children to check out on a weekly basis based on Jessica's system.  My class loved the homework bags last year and I will begin allowing students to check them out soon for this class.

I bought the Bulletin Board set for Brown Bear, Brown Bear and knew I could use the mini pictures from the package somehow!  I laminated them and velcroed them to a chart.  The kids can practice story sequencing using this chart as a Go-To Activity when they finish their literacy job.  I also printed and laminated word labels for each animal for the kids to practice matching the words to the character. 

I also got this idea from Suzan at http://krazyforkindergarten.blogspot.com/.  We painted our own Story Map working in teams to paint each color in the order of the story.  We then placed the story characters on the map to match their color.

Ms. Larremore at http://larremoreteachertips.blogspot.com/ 

used this writing activity to help reinforce the story but also to practice name recognition of friends in class.  These writings will go in their Kindergarten Scrapbooks with Bear Art.