Brown Bear, Brown Bear

April 24, 2019 /
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We LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle in this house and decided to use it to create a little theme week! Lots of storytime activities to pair along with the book – one for each page of the story! This was a great way to extend the reading and talk about the ways things we see in books – like colors, numbers, days of the week etc. apply in real life.

Brown Bear

Day one was the star of the show – Brown Bear himself. We started with some paper plates and brown paint. While the kids were busy painting I cut out four half circles per kid by folding the paper over a few times. I made two cuts – a big outer ear and small inner ear, and then cut out an oval on which we drew the nose and mouth. The kids then glued the ears together and then glued these, the googley eyes and the mouth onto the plate. In my experience nothing makes a toddler happier than some glue and googley eyes.

I had originally intended to do these as masks but we decided to go this way instead – mostly because all my kids were asking for googley eyes. To make them into masks simply cut out holes for the eyes instead of the googley eyes. You can then either use a hole punch on either side of the plate to attach a string or glue a large size popsicle stick on the bottom to hold your mask up with.

Red Bird

Red bird is our next character as we make our way through the book and was one of our favorite activities in this theme week! I started off by drawing and cutting out a rough bird shape for each kid. Then the kids and I worked together to squeeze glue all over leaving a little space clear for the face.

I handed them each a pile of red feathers and let them go nuts with it gluing feathers all over the place.  They really loved this part and even squeezed in a few feather tickles as they worked. We were able to talk about a little bird vocabulary in ways we wouldn’t usually focus on – such as the where the wings were or adding tail feathers – and of course the point of the whole animal – the color red!

For the face I cut a little half circle out of black construction paper and we added that to the head of the bird, before gluing on a beak and of course a googley eye! I’m beginning to think there will be few projects left in this house that don’t include a googley eye with how adamantly obsessed they are with them.

Yellow Duck

Yellow Duck was such an easy activity – it’s something you could set up in minutes whenever you needed something to keep the kids entertained for a spell. Plus it was nothing I had to worry about getting in their mouths so this is a great one for even the littlest member of your family to try. We put a little water in our sensory tray (which is just the top of a veggie dip container) along with our rubber duckies and a few cut up pieces of an old washcloth. The kids had a blast washing their ducks and we added some little cups so they could practice pouring water over the ducks too. I taught them how to ring out the washcloths to get the water out and we tried filling our cups that way a few times.

If you wanted to keep the yellow theme a little stronger you could also add a few drops of yellow food coloring or one of these awesome bath color tablets to the water. I really couldn’t believe just how long this kept them entertained. And although there was some spilling it was just water so we honestly could’ve just left it to dry, but they easily helped clean up what they’d spilled at the end. Great life skills and sensory play here!

Blue Horse

Next up in our story is the Blue Horse. For this activity we simply cut out a horse and had the kids use their fingers and some paint brushes to paint it blue. We used one of our favorite paints – Crayola Kids Paints – which are so easy to clean up and come off clothes, furniture and fingers with a wipe or a wet paper towel (and believe me I’ve tried it all often).

The kids had a lot of fun painting away and seeing the character come to life as I showed them the story while they painted. We also tried using a lighter and darker blue to separate the mane and the tail, but this was lost on toddlers who enjoyed mixing it all together. Maybe for preschoolers or bigger kids you’d have better luck though!

If drawing horses isn’t your thing feel free to borrow ours which you can print out below for free!

Blue Horse Printable

Green Frog

We had a lot of fun with our green frogs today! I bought a little pack of assorted frogs, pulled out all the green ones and we used them to paint! We tried a little color mixing since that was so much fun yesterday – using blue and yellow to make our green, and then also added some green paint in just for fun.

After hopping them around the paper for a bit we decided to make a little pond for them so the paint plate was transformed! This has been a great go to little “small world” of frogs and ponds that we’ve been coming back to play with over and over again once the paint dried.

If you don’t know the song “Five Green and Speckled Frogs” check it out as a great addition to this play time! Even without it thought there was so much going on here whether it was using our fine motor skills, sensory play or learning about colors this is an activity that hits many levels outside of the art itself.

Purple Cat

My original design for this project was to have the kids use purple yarn to trace the outline of a purple cat. So I drew a cat and cut up lots of string – we worked together to put glue over the lines and then they could glue the strings on!

This was great for my oldest who could line up the string, but a bit complicated for my youngest so we just adjusted and put glue all over the inside of her cat. She had a great time decorating with the strings kind of making her own “fur”. Either way it was lots of fun and a great activity to work on that pincer grip picking up each string!

At the end we added some googley eyes and little tongues to make it just like the one in the book!

I was actually surprised at what a hit this project was! The kids wanted to make a few more pictures themselves just with the string and paper so we did some abstract art and tried to make different shapes with our strings. A couple of circles for a snowman was the clear favorite! I don’t know what kept them so focused, but suppose it was just a fun new material for them to play around with.

White Dog

The white dog was a tricky character to work with. We thought about outlining and just letting them color in with chalk but that felt a little boring since we have been working on so many new skills. We decided to try some cutting practice and make a chain link dog instead! The kids tried cutting for about a minute, but weren’t very interested – this is still a frustrating task for my two year olds so we didn’t push it. Instead I cut most of the strips out and they glued them together into the circles to make a chain – with a little direction on where to start chaining for the legs. We then used a red strip for the collar and glued his face on that as well as a tail on the back. Of course we added some googley eyes (we really can’t get enough of these) and a little nose to complete our pups!

While the cutting idea didn’t go over to well they still got lots of great fine motor practice working with the paper and learning how to use it gently enough so they didn’t crush it!

Black Sheep

This was another great activity to work on those pincer grips! We cut out sheep and had the kids glue black pompoms on everywhere except the face! We had a great conversation about how pompoms felt different from some of the other materials we had used – all these new textures have made for some great sensory play and lots of new vocabulary. Then we added our googley eyes and I decided to color in some of the hooves that had been left pom-pomless by the kids.

Depending on the age of the kids you are doing this with you can easily adjust it by using bigger (for the littles) or smaller (for the bigger kids) pompoms as the older they get the better their dexterity and less likely they are to try to taste them. Either way this is a super easy task for the kiddos with very minimal clean up! That’s my kind of art project – especially on an appointment packed day like today.

Goldfish

This was another great activity as we continued to work our way through the characters of the story. We spent sometime ripping up tissue paper from my daughter’s birthday present and then used some glue to attach the “scales” to our fish! A great way to recycle the paper – you could also do this with paper you’ve painted orange or construction paper, but the tissue paper is the easiest for little hands to rip.

This one reminded me a lot of the rainbow fish story so we talked a lot about sharing our scales with our siblings as we worked (we may have to do this again with lots of colors after we read that book). As usual they requested some googley eyes to finish off their creations and were excited to show off which one they had made themselves!

Teacher

While I had some fun ideas for creating our own teacher character – picasso(ing) together faces from cut out body parts or using yarn to create her hair, my kids have been really into pretend play the last few weeks so I decided to let them take the lead on this one. We found some fun glasses in the party favors at Target (always the feature kids notice the most about the teacher) and decided to take turns playing the teacher role. We talked about the work teachers do and how they are different from Mommy. We had lots of fun with our chalkboard (which I’m pretty sure teachers don’t use much anymore) and the kid who was playing teacher would use our letter puzzle to show the other ones or me the letters that they knew! It was super cute watching them try to coordinate who was teacher – not really a two year old skill, but they tried somewhat. Mostly they all just had fun “being” the teacher.

Next time maybe we’ll be more creative and make our own glasses out of cardboard!

Children

I actually really loved this one because it is so reusable!

We glued some pictures of the children from the book (and a few of ourselves) onto popsicle sticks cut a few lines in a cardboard box and basically called it a new toy! They had a blast pulling them in/out and got to work on those fine motor skills too! While my oldest was done with it pretty quickly it held my girls attention for quite some time. We were able to work on our colors as we’ve been doing with each animal, counting and even did a couple rounds of naming colors or counting in Spanish! It was a nice quiet activity for them to work on independently – and in all honesty a nice break for me from the mess or reminders not to eat the art materials that we’ve been using for the other projects! I also loved that this wasn’t a one and done activity and we can set it up in our playroom for them to keep using.

Although our Brown Bear themed activities are coming to an end I’ve noticed that their interest in the book has only increased. Now instead of passively reading they are running or pointing to their art work for each animal (“just like I made!”) and getting really into guessing who is coming next! I love that we can get them actively involved in a great story and work on so many other awesome skills along the way! Now I’m just ready and excited for our next big adventure as we start our summer of travel – but don’t worry we’ll have lots more activities for you and them along the way!

Road Tripping: Pediatrician Approved
Easter

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