Before FIAR - We're Going on a Bear Hunt and Blueberries for Sal Part 1

We are on our second week of activities for these two books.  Last week we read only We're Going on a Bear Hunt.  This week, we are also reading Blueberries for Sal, but since we haven't finished the activities for Bear Hunt, we are rereading this one too.  Warning: long post.
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Practical Life  

• Cutting Strips

 We have these wonderful scissors from Timberdoodle (a purchase, not a free review item).  I love them, yet only recommend them for a toddler/preschooler who has not yet tried real scissors.  J-jo keeps wanting to stick his fingers in the hole (because I have tried him with real scissors), but when I redirect him, he can successfully use these on strips with a bit of help from me holding the strip.  He is nowhere close with real scissors.

 I used a bear clipart in a Word document to make these strips.

Sensorial

• Sensory Bin

Delightful Learning has a great We're Going on a Bear Hunt sensory bin that I pretty much copied, changing things up slightly to work with our supplies.

• grass - paper (see photo below)
• river - blue aquarium rocks
• mud - brown felt rectangle, rolled up
• forest - trees from a Toob
• snowstorm - Bear helped with this one and suggested we take the white fabric squares from the Corduroy fabric match
• cave - the one from the bear sensory bin from the week before.

• oozy substances - we haven't done this yet, so I have no photos - to come in Part 2, but get a sneak preview at Delightful Learning - I got the idea from her.

Science 

Worksheets were found at Time for Kids, from a sample PDF of the Prairie Primer, and from kidzone.

• hibernation
• lifecycle
• diet
• habitat
• parts of a bear

Some YouTube videos
catching fish
hibernation
hibernation (in stills, more like a power point presentation)

Geography

• where bears live - we placed all the bears we had from various Toobs and placed them on the correct continents.  I then made our own types of bear nomenclature cards, but didn't cut them out as three part cards, just left them together so we could play memory.

Language Arts

• Reading about bears

• Poetry basket

•    Bear songs at calendar time - most of which were from CanTeach

French 

• reading about bears in French, 
• answering questions in French about bears, 
• singing songs and reciting poems in French
• tracing the word "ours" (bear)
• puzzle of the word "ours" (from a word building puzzle my mom found us at a thrift store in Quebec)

 I got it in my head that we need to do more French during school and I was curious to know if I could find any resources for We're Going on a Bear Hunt in French, since I know they have translated the book.

 I found the french text to the book here from this site.

You can listen to the song in French here. 

Art

 

 We drew bears, looking at an how-to-draw book we had in the house.

I have a neat project planned for this week that I'll share in Part 2.

Math

Color game (Orchard Toys) - matching, sorting

 

  Counting Bears:
o Sort by colors
o Sort by size
o Patterning
o One to one
correspondence
o Counting

 I made a counting and color book for J-jo using clipart and the words came from a first grade or kindergarten blog (I will need to search for the link).  The teacher had it as a pocket chart activity.

Drama

We made our own bear cave and acted out the story.  

Bear and J-jo have also been pretending to be a hibernating mama bear and bear cub underneath our duvet in the morning before I get a chance to make the bed. 

Kidzone is a good resource for bear activities.

Whew, you've read to the end (or skimmed, or maybe just looked at photos). Thanks for sticking it out.

Linked to Tot School at 1+1+1=1; Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations; Mom 2 lil Posh Divas; Beneath the Rowan Tree and the Weekly Wrap-up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.