Brown Bear

My kids love Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?     Most of them come to me already knowing the words by heart.  When I began teaching many moons ago, Brown Bear was one of the first books I bought for my Kindergarten classroom.

About 5 years ago, I had my class make many fingerpaintings that I used to create a Brown Bear big book for the class.  I cut out each shape of each animal following Eric Carle's excellent illustrations.  I felt so artistic!  I finally found the  real big book at Lakeshore a few years ago.  I use both in my classroom now (along with several smaller versions).

 We discuss the animals, the colors, the words that repeat, how the color words describe the animals, how you get to predict what comes next.  We sing the Brown Bear song by Greg and Steve and learn the sign language for the colors and the animals.  Here is another version by Bill Martin on Youtube:

We make a predictive chart (I see a yellow frog.  I see a blue whale.).  We play with the sentences whole group, cut them apart and put them back together.  I retype their sentences and give them to the kids all cut apart and they glue it to a piece of paper to illustrate and we make a class book.  We graph our favorite animals (purple cat seems to win a lot?).

I have a commercially made Brown Bear game.  I found more Brown Bear activities this summer at 1plus 1plus 1 equals 1.

And we fingerpaint!