Saturday, July 15, 2017

Tot School: Bear Counts

It's Bear Day during our Camping Unit with Mother Goose Time, and my girl loves bears!


We started our day with the book Bear Counts that we checked out from our local library.
We love all these Bear books!  With this one, we would go back and forth between the pages finding what the bear saw a certain number of.



Reading that book was the perfect way to introduce our bear counting game.

-Red pompoms (berries)
-Berry cards to go in our giant die
-Bear cards

How to play:
- Place the berry cards inside the die pockets and roll
-Count the number of berries
- Place that number of berries (red pompoms) onto one of the bear cards
-Roll again and repeat the process with the other bear cards.



We added our own Bear mask.
Sweet Pea has been obsessed with wearing her animal masks especially the bear one. 
(24 Foam Animal Masks) She loves to run around the house "Roooooar"-ing like a bear.





This activity was perfect using one-to-one correspondence.
Sweet Pea would count and I would ask her questions like,
"Which bear has the most berries?"
"Which bear has the fewest berries?"
By looking at what she had done and counted, 
Sweet Pea could easily point and tell me which bear was which.



Once we finished our Bear Counts activity, it was time to move on to our 
Invitation to Create: Bears!

Mother Goose Time supplied us with:
-Green Paper
-Bear Stencil with Bear punch out
-Foam Piece (use as a paintbrush)
-Bear and Cubs photo

All I had to supply was the brown tempra paint. 
Because tempra paint doesn't stain and washes out of clothes easily, 
it is the perfect paint for toddler and preschool crafts.



Sweet Pea struggled with holding the stencil and painting at the same time, so I helped her by holding down the stencil.  If you have more than one child doing this at a time, you could tape the stencil down or use sticky tack to hold it down while the child paints.  




She loved this!  After Sweet Pea finished her painting, she still wanted to paint more bears.  So I went and found a piece of 12x12 green paper in my craft stash, and she kept on painting!  I adore it when she desires to keep on doing one of the art projects or games over and over.

She whipped out her magnifying glass (one of our monthly manipulatives from this unit), and studied the bears she painted and other things in her play space. 


When Dad came home from work, she ran to him exclaiming about her bear artwork and showing him her paintings.  I love that she is so excited about her work.

Happy Bear Day!

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Products we used today and use constantly in our Tot School:

               

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