Brown Bear, Brown Bear

We borrowed “Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What do you see?” from the library a week or so ago, and have been reading in a lot along with “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?” – who know there was a whole franchise of these! Since Munchkin has picked these as her current favourite books, it seemed like a great first book theme for our week.

This was our second week working just two days. On Tuesday, Munchkin just wasn’t interested, and we spent less than 15 minutes total on our totschool. On Thursday, I brought out the Tuesday and Thursday trays, and we worked for a long time. I think I need to up the number of trays available each day, and I also think that I will present almost the same set of trays on both days – perhaps not the art project – so that the skills we are working on are reinforced, and if one of the days is an off day, we still get to work through everything.

Our plan for the week is as follows:

	Art/Craft	Table Time I	Table Time II
Tuesday	tissue paper poke	brown bear sizing	tongs and pom pom transfer
Thursday	TBD	brown bear animal/word match	math links and cards

 

Anytime tray: Brown Bear heads and tails cards

Sensory bin: teddy bear’s picnic

 

Monday

Though we are only totschooling on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’m still setting out her bin and tray on Sunday night, for the whole week. After a pretty good first morning of school and a nap, we spent a lot of time playing Teddy Bear’s Picnic, and working with the Brown Bear head and tail cards. When serving tea, Munchkin made sure the spoon colour matched the cup colour.

Tuesday

As mentioned, Munchkin was not into tot school on Tuesday. We flew through the trays. She wanted nothing to do with the tissue paper poking tray, and mostly transferred the pom poms with her hands. She did, however focus to line up all the brown bears from smallest to largest – and she got them all right.

Thursday

Today, we accomplished a lot. I brought out most of the activities from Tuesday (since we barely worked on them) plus new Thursday activities.

First, Munchkin selected working with number/pattern cards and math links. I had her lay the links over the dots, since she can’t thread them. Once she match the links to the dots, I then threaded them together for her. This seemed to eliminate frustration (and she helped me push the links together). We worked on this for quite a while, and got through a lot of the cards.

Next, she selected the tissue paper poke – and actually poked tissue paper into the styrofoam! We used paintbrushes as our tools. This didn’t last too long – she also enjoyed pulling the paper back out. Next came the pom pom transfer, and she must have transferred poms between the two bowls 4 or 5 time with the tongs. The last time she transferred, I asked her to pick out specific colours, and she did.

Finally, we worked with pictures of the animals from Brown Bear, Brown Bear and also the names of each animal, printed so that she could match the colour. We pulled out our Brown Bear book and read through it at the same time to put the matches in order. She did really well at this, although the task was a little long, and I completed the last two for her. After we looked at our line up, she wanted to “squish” the animal pictures into the correct page of the book – so we did a few of those too.

Sadly, no updates to our art wall this week, but we still accomplished a lot.