Book of the Week: Brown Bear

My Before Five in a Row (BFIAR) book finally arrived! I am really excited to get started! However, I am holding off until I have fully read through the entire book. Half of the book, the back half, is full of ideas, songs, crafts etc... and I don't want to miss a thing!

So, for now, I am continuing with the same concept as BFIAR or FIAR, with our "Book of the Week". This weeks book is following our Letter of the Week. The Letter of this Week is 'B', so I thought Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? By Bill Martin Jr. would be a fun one! 

I started Brown Bear by first getting V a snack of Teddy Grahams and some juice. The book itself is pretty short, so I actually read it twice. The first time that I read it I read it straight through but the second time I stopped to make each animal sound and to do the sign for the animal as well.

I got all of my print outs for today's lessons and activities (for free) from a wonderful blog called 1+1+1=1. 

Brown Bear is a predictable book. I can remember my when this was my oldest daughters favorite book. She had it memorized and because she knew her colors and knew what was coming next in the book, she thought that she could read and felt so good about herself. That high self esteem in reading at a young age is invaluable when teaching children to read and predictable books are such a great "tool" (in my opinion) to help children feel good about their abilities in learning how to read.

Anyway, besides being a predictable book it is mainly about colors and animals of course! So I thought that for today, we would keep it simple and stick with colors. Vada began coloring her very own book. 

She got three pages done today, the Red Bird, the Brown Bear and the Yellow Duck. We'll work more on this book throughout the week and by the end of the week i'll laminate it for her and she will have her own book to carry around with her. Hopefully, when she looks at it, it'll make her proud of her work. (She always points to the "I did that" wall and giggles with joy and I know its because she remembers making the things that's hanging up there!)

Next we played Heads and Tails, a color matching game. 

We started off by making the matches together and then I would show her the page in the book that went with the cards.

Afterward, I put both of the matching color pieces out within her reach and simply asked her to put them together and for the most part, she did!

At the end of our day we read our Alphabet book and sang the Alphabet song together as usual but we then added a new letter to our Alphabet Center, the upper and lowercase letter 'B's'.