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 :)

A Tree Dice Game

This week we tried the fall dice game after reading this post from My Montessori Journey.  I got bored with our numbers and counters activity that I wanted to try a different approach with math this time.

Since I'm saving ink, I just made all of these out of cardstock instead of the ones made available for download.  I made the dice direction by drawing the leaves, use crayons to color them and added the dice counterparts (was based on the original file).    This would have been better if I made the tree trunk out of brown foam sheet though so I can reuse it in the future.  But the thing is I can't find a brown foam sheet here so I might as well redo the tree trunk out of a felt paper.  Anyway, for the maple leaves... I printed it out of different colored cardstocks and cut each one.  It requires a lot of work, but you can save a lot of time if you can purchase small craft foam leaves.   

Here’s how my version works:

1. Position the tree.
2. Make the child identify the number that appears after rolling/tossing the dice. 
3. Based on your dice direction (see white paper), put the colored leaf that corresponds to the number of the dice.
4. If your child doesn’t recognize the number dots on the dice you can have him match it to your direction card.

      

My son loves playing this game.  He enjoys tossing the dice and becomes giddy every time he puts a leaf on the tree.  He can easily recognize the dots on the dice from 1-4 but gets confuse between 5 and 6 at at times.  We will continue playing this game especially Fall is just around the corner :)

 

Later on, he decided to group the leaves according to their colors :)

Practical Life Activities

Because he’s in school most of the time, we seldom do practical life activities.  Last Friday he was home the whole day and I made him do some activities while at home.

Here he is practicing how to use a chopstick.  I got the chopstick trainer from a craft store nearby and made use of all our old pompoms.  At first he finds it difficult to pick up the pompoms out of the container.  You see, the pompoms are very soft so it needs a lot of eye and hand coordination and concentration as well in order to pick them up.  Finally after a few tries, he was able to discover a few techniques so he can pick and transfer them on the ice tray.

We have this toy for a long time and it didn’t occurred to me that we can use it to practice stringing.   Since my son is obsessed with letters, I know that he would love doing this activity.  When I gave it to him and showed him how I can string the letters together with pipe cleaners, boy oh boy, he immediately asked for his own set too!

Another thing that you can do here is practice reading cvc words by putting 3-letters words together and read it together. This way, it’s much more fun than just putting cvc letters together on the fridge :)   My son loves to string everything together and pretend that it is his crown. He would put it on his head and proclaim himself as “the king”.