The Modern Dad
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Brown Bear, Brown Bear

As we are all trying to figure out how to do this whole home school thing, my wife Emily decided to put her teaching skills to use for you. She taught second grade for seven years and has a lot of fun ideas that you can use during this time: free printables, links to resources, and fun center ideas. Hope this helps! Now, let’s get started with learning.

Learning colors and simple vocabulary is an important skill for preschoolers. The best way for them to learn it is through repetition. I love the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin because it does just that. We also love “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen. The kids love acting out this one.

Reading

I usually start by reading the book. My kids are very familiar with the book and like to read it with me. Following the reading, we like to add some movement. So we will read it again, but this time make sounds or movements that the animals make. We will fly like a bird, hop like a frog, growl like a bear, or gallop like a horse.

Writing

I like to do writing work every day. Here are a few fun writing activities for every level. Keep in mind that each age has different skills that are appropriate. Will (3) colors. Olive (4) traces most letters to help model correct writing. Nixon (6) writes without prompts. Be creative. You can write words or sentences and usually don’t need any fancy papers.

Here are some simple printables for you to use (click for the PDF version):

Brown Bear Brown Bear Coloring Activity
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Freebie (Student Book)

Language

Sentence structure. (I see a) (color) (animal) (picture). Then have them write a few sentences. Our preschooler can do one. Our kindergartener I make do three.

Brown Bear
Brown Bear Sentence Construction

Here are the word strips that I used. I kept the repetitive “I see a” together and clumped the color/animals. Then use the above pictures to add another element to the activity.

Math

This is a perfect lesson for creating graphs. I printed animals and placed them on a large dice but you can easily print the entire packet. I like to just print out what I need. You could even just place the pictures from above in a box and have them draw them out. Just keep putting them back in the box so that you can have multiple items for your graph.

Bar Graph

Here is my basic bar graph template.

Here is a little more creative graph sheet.

Brown Bear Count, Tally, Graph and Add --- Brown Bear I Spy ***FREEBIE***

Art

Paint a brown bear using a plastic fork.

Fork Painted Bear - Kid Craft

Centers

  1. Color treasure hunt. You can do this a number of ways but basically have them find different objects that are different colors. I put out papers that were the colors I wanted them to practice. (If you don’t want a mess, take one bin of toys and have them find all of the toys that are a specific color.)
  2. Color sheet.
  3. Heads and tails. Match the heads to the tails of the animals from the book.
  4. Animal match. Match each animal to its color

Additional Resources

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