January 3rd Week

January 21 - Bears

Our morning always start with the students doing a floor puzzle or an individual puzzle as we wait for everyone to arrive and get ready for the day. This morning the students noticed that some new things had been added to our classroom. [Four day weekends are great for working on special projects.] The students were looking around while we were trying to have our morning meeting.

I took advantage of their interest and we got our binoculars and played a quick game of "I Spy with my little eyes."

We spied the five different bear pictures around the room, new work stations, and even checked in on our hibernating animals in their den.

After finding some interesting things around the room we needed to focus by reading/retelling "The Three Bears" by  F. Rojankovsky, a Little Golden Book. We talked about size, used our voices to dramatize the different bears, and practiced retelling the story with our eyes closed. Nothing like a little imagination for setting the mood.

To learn about some unique bears we used "My Itsy Bitsy Bear Book" from http://www.kidzone.ws/lw/bears/ws7.htm as our guide. We did our best imitation of a bear walk and found the picture of a panda bear. We learned a how tall panda bears are, what they like to eat, how much they weigh, and the legend of the panda, http://pandajaan.tripod.com/Panda%20Story.htm. It is a cute story especially for little girls. We checked our guide books and bear walked over to the Sun bear. Here we learned that black Sun bears got their name from the orange 'rising sun' on their chest and they make their nests in tree branches that they have pulled down to the ground. Crawling on we learned about America's black and brown bears. We ran and took a quick peek to make sure our own black and brown bears were still hibernating, they were. Lastly we learned about the Asiatic bear. They make their nests in trees and they are black with a cream colored V/Y shape on their chest. To wrap up our lesson we went back to our world rug and talked about where the bears live. We discovered that the most uniquely colored bears live in Asia.

For our snack we talked about how hungry our hibernating bears would be when they woke up. So we each got an animal cracker bear (a mama bear who had given birth to two baby bears), four fish six honey comb cereals, and ten Craisins (for the berries). We also got a daddy bear who ate the same as the mama bear, 4 fish, 6 honeycombs, and 10 berries.

We are pretty sure that after hibernating for such a long time they bears would be ready to do some stretching. To help us get stretched out we played the game Dr. Seuss Super Stretchy ABC. It is like 'Twister' but incorporating the ABC's. We found it difficult to get each hand and foot on different letters and then get our ear on another letter, all at the same time. There were lots of giggles when the teacher tried. :~}

We started a new book "Three Pigs, One Wolf, and Seven Magic Shapes" and then practiced our math skills as we made objects with Tangrams. We read the first page and made a duck and a cat. This was a new activity and it took us some time to get it just right.

For Language Arts we learned a new sight word 'the' by singing "The T-H-E Song" tune 'Farmer in the Dell.' We started to do our lesson on the letter Ff, but we had been doing so many focused learning activities that our brains just needed time to process and store the things we learned.

So we voted on what activity would interest them and they decided to chill out and look at some of their favorite books. We pulled out the bean bags and chilled out with some great books.

Homework was to color the Three Bears worksheet and retell the story to their families.