Brown Bear, Brown Bear...Eric Carle Fun!

All I know is...you can't miss with Eric Carle.  Just a hard, cold truth, people. :)  The kids always enjoy Brown Bear, Brown Bear! Due to scheduling and adjusting to a new math program and the way it fits into the schedule, I condensed my bear unit (part one, anyway) to one day.  So, last Friday was Brown Bear, Brown Bear Day, officially! Of course, we start with reading the story just for fun.  Then we read it again!

I have these picture cards from last year to use as our story map.

Check out this post from last year and the variation on the story map that we made then.

This little guy made sure we recited the story in the correct order!

They did a great job retelling and no, we didn't get loud at all...

We colored character pictures to make our own Story Bags.

We told the story together and laid out our pictures one at a time.

They were very serious about getting their pictures laid out just right...

I usually use paper bags for this project but low and behold, the cupboard was bare.  Baggies worked just fine.  The kids wrote their name on the front of their baggie with a brown sharpie.  I think that was almost their favorite part! At the end of the day, they took their bags home so they could retell the story to their family.

I brought this poster back out from last year for the kids to use as another retell activity.

These small  pieces were from the bulletin board set that I bought last year (and totally forgot to use this year!).  I attached them with velcro and numbered them on the back.  I also have word cards to be used in addition to the picture cards. 

We also used gummy bears for a sorting activity in our math journals that afternoon.

This activity was also good practice for writing color words.

One to One Correspondence.

Of course, there HAD to be an art project!

This project is from my friend, Suzan, at Krazy for Kindergarten.  She used this as a Five Senses activity.  Amazingly, no one ate their gluey Big Red gum....

Their job was to fill in their name and their partner's name into the Brown Bear script
and then illustrate their partner. This writing activity came from April Larremore at Chalk Talk.

Brown Bear Scrapbook Writing

Brown Bear Scrapbook Script

Making their bears with googly eyes, crinkled brown paper, pompoms and Big Red gum.

Here's the finished page that will be added to their Kindergarten Scrapbooks.  I added the Brown Bear caption to the page after the photo was taken.  It was a fun day and I felt we did justice to Eric Carle... for now.

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.