Brown Bear Activites II

Last week's activities were such a hit!  Well, maybe it wasn't even the activities, but that he loves the Brown Bear book and he seriously played with all the little shapes and cards all week long.  They were constantly all over the house and some of them are still MIA.  So I thought I would come up with some more activities and make a Tot Book for him.

Pretty much all of the ideas shown are printables from 1+1+1=1 (except for the small red piece on the left--that just says My Name on the outside and Owen on the inside).  I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I guess I imagined I would take it out and we would sit down and look at the different parts of it together.  You know, in a civilized, adult manner.  Well, this is what happened immediately

Followed by this

And I have to admit, I was totally overwhelmed.  So I would imagine Owen was too.  Suddenly there was too much stuff.  It was everywhere.  I could hardly sort my thoughts (although I must admit that "stuff" easily overwhelms me).  So at first I gave up (haha.  typical).  I just let him do his thing.  Then I slowly rounded up the different elements and took them out of the mix and we looked at some of the different parts by themselves.

Surprisingly, he really likes the ABC sheet.  Its a fun accordian piece.  He has been carrying it all over the house.  Sometimes he wants to talk about the animals on it and sometimes he wants me to sing the song, which he tries to sing along to. I tried to take a pic of him running around with it but he moves too fast ;)

He also loves the Looking At Me mini-book and the Heads and Tails cards, although he doesn't really get that the cards are supposed to be put together, he just likes to look at the pieces and name them.

I had pulled out this shadow game knowing it would be too complicated.  Owen liked looking at the shadows and playing with the pieces, although not together ;) 

He actually came up with his own game when he saw this sorting sheet where the animals were in color, and made his own matching game.  He didn't get every one right, but he would lay down some of the cards on to the right pictures.  It was a much better game than the ones I came  up with.

So now I think I will keep most of this stuff out of sight and bring out one at a time to play with.  Mostly he just does free play with the different shapes which is fine by me, I interrupt every once in a while.  And if you didn't know (cause I didn't) there are several other related books, Panda Bear, Panda Bear what do you See? Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do you Hear? and Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What do you See?  some of them seem a bit more advanced to me, but Owen loves them just the same and we have been reading them constantly.

Brown Bear Activites

So as I mentioned previously, we checked the book Brown, Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? out of the library the other day and my son was instantly enamored with it. He loves to read books, but the amount of times he has wanted to read it each day has surpassed previous records. So in light of that, I decided to find some brown bear activites to do around the house.

By far the easiest (and most entertaining for him) was making characters for the felt board. These are actually printables from 1+1+1=1, intended to be a puzzle, but I just cut them out, reinforced each side with clear packing tape, and taped velcro from a disposable diaper on the back. Instant felt board fun! What I like about these printables is that they actually are the same pictures used in the book, which makes it easier for my son to recognize. We have done several things with them today:

--he has just played with them on his own (calling them by name, making animal sounds, carrying them around the house)
--I went through the whole Brown Bear schpiel with them, reenacting the book
--I asked him "where is the green frog?" (etc.) and had him point at the right animal
--While we were reading the book I would stop at each animal and ask him to find the cutout that matched, again, "where is the blue horse?" and he would get it for me
--I tried to do a color activity with pompoms but he wasn't interested.

He seriously loves these cutouts, I have a feeling that they will get worn out even though I reinforced them!

Another fun activity was that I downloaded these tiny cutouts from Making Learning Fun  that were intended for use in an eye spy bottle (which I made later). First, though, I put the cutouts into our rice bin but I didn't do much hiding because I wasn't sure if he would find them.

Owen had a lot of fun pulling out all the different characters, naming them, making noises, etc. I enjoy having him do this activity while I clean the kitchen because it keeps him occupied and in sight and I don't feel like I am being neglectful even though I am not really participating. An unintentional bonus of this was that he did less throwing of the rice since he was so into the cutouts.

Next I made the eye spy bottle, and I think it is really cute, but I think that if you make it, you should print out two copies of the pictures because it was hard to see the animals when they were facing the wrong way.  I don't know if I am explaining that right, but I plan on printing out another copy so that there is a picture on the front and back of each piece so it will be easier to play with.  Otherwise I thought it was a great activity and a great idea!  I have tried a bunch of times today to find the page on the Making Learning Fun where the list of printables came from but all I have is the link to the eye spy bottle, so here it is for you.  

We also got started on a mini brown bear coloring book that will end up in our tot book at the end of this week

As well as played with these number cards.  Owen doesn't really count with me (although he counts with his daddy, I think) but I often hear him "counting"... Usually it goes "three, four, five, nine.."  and thats about it.  so cute ;)  Both the number cards and the coloring book can also be found on the 1+1+1=1 website here.  If you are wondering, the #9 card is too dirty from lunch to be displayed here ;)

All in all, I think it was a successful day--Owen was so happy to have so much brown bear stuff to play with!  I really enjoyed to have an easy theme to work with...  I liked working it around the book and hope I can come up with other book-themes in the future!

redredredredred

In general, Owen and I are repeating the activities we do during the week so I try not to post about those.  I wrote about some red activites we have done here.  These are a few other red activities we are doing.

Red Collage!  It takes less than 15 minutes to flip through your old magazines, tear out red pictures or pages and cut (or tear) them into shapes.  I found some contact paper (we bought it for the purpose of being a drawer liner) and cut a big rectangle out of it.  I helped Owen put the red items onto the sticky part of the contact paper to create a red collage.

We hung it up in his toy closet, where we will hang other color creations in the future. ok, I should have been more thoughtul... The placement of this picture made Owen very angry since he couldn't reach it.  I moved it to a lower position that he can see at eye level and he is loving looking at it now.

I also spent about five minutes drawing pictures of red items and made a small book.  I added a wagon, t-shirt, apple, car, elmo and a truck.  I did not write any words, mostly because I am lazy...  I read it to him in the style of the book "Brown Bear" (Red wagon, red wagon, what do you see?  I see a red shirt looking at me, etc.)  I was surprised that he really enjoyed the book because it seemed boring to me. 

We also did some cooking (Owen stirring up ingredients + food coloring), played with red (and not red) cars, read some red books, and.. thats about it.  Sometime this weekend I might freeze some red ice cubes and let him play with them in the tub or in the kitchen with bowls of water.  He did some water play yesterday for almost an hour, which is pretty incredible amount of time to keep a toddler interested.  Yes, everything got wet, but the cleanup was remarkably easier than anything else we do.

Circles and Triangles (yes, again!)

Today we have done some of the activities from Tuesday, along with a few new ones that I really enjoyed. My favorite activity was rolling this shapes dice.

I got the idea here at Toddler Toddler .  I wrapped a kleenex box in paper towels like I was wrapping a present (again, I am seeing a serious materials shortage at my house...  we need paper!  And real tape!).  Since I figured it wouldn't last long, I quickly drew shapes onto the box, although once I get real paper I will probably cut the shapes out.  This all took less than five minutes and voila! Shapes dice.  We rolled the dice and then called out the shape that was on it--I only put circles and triangles on it to keep it simple.  It was really fun.  Obviously it is already falling apart due to Owen feeling like he has to claw the box to throw it, but it was a very fun activity and I know we will do it again soon!

I also downloaded this simple shapes book a few days ago called Shape Monster from Hubbard's Cupboard

I think it is designed to be for kids to put together but we don't have many shape books so I figured it would be perfect for us.  I colored the shapes and put it together and we read it a few times.  Owen seemed to like it and was especially interested in the circle and triangle pages.

The other "new" activity today was playing with the shapes sorter game.

Oh, I hate the shapes sorter, it has been the bane of my existance.. Owen doesn't understand it and all he ever wants to do is dump the pieces out all over the place so I step on them and hurt my feet... But today I tried something new, and got out just the circles and triangles thinking that maybe the more complicated shapes overwhelmed him (Whats with the star and plus sign? Whats wrong with a rectangle or oval or something?).  He got the circle right away and needed a little help with the triangle but I was very surprised that he even did that well since he hasn't been able to do it before.   I'm going to try my best not to hate this toy and to play with it some more in the future.

Finally, I know that I posted this the other day but I thought I would post the sensory bean tub again,  It is one of Owen's favorite things to do, plus we added a little singing to the activity today.  We had lots of scooping implements as well as the triangle and circle shapes, and I let him play by himself with it for awhile (which, in general, means disaster).

When I came back I remembered that we have been singing a song from storytime lately to the tune of "where is thumbkin" so I made up a very easy song for the shapes.  "where's the circle? wheres the circle? Here is is, Here it is, this is a circle, this is a circle, here it is, here it is."  yeah, I know, am a genius songwriter.  But he loved the song and I think it helped reinforce the shapes (which he mostly understands now).  We also sang about other things like "where's the bowl, spoon, etc."  I'm pretty sure I am going to incorporate this song into other activities because it worked pretty well for us.

Also, this afternoon, if we have time or inclination, I will bring out the playdough and use the shapes sorter shapes to press into the dough.  But maybe we will save that or another day, who knows?

Anyway, thats what we are up to, hope you got some ideas that you can use and please share with me anything you have been doing that you think we would enjoy!