Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

I love Brown Bear week in preschool!  I love this book because it’s so simple, yet there is SO much you can do with it.  Here are some of the things we did this week in therapy to go along with the book!

While reading the book, I had my kids tell me the name of the animal on each page, and also targeted some WH questions by asking them questions about the animals (i.e. “What do dogs like to chew on?” when we got to ‘white dog,’ or “Where do ducks live?” when we got to ‘yellow duck.’).

(link to purchase the book on Amazon)

I love all of the early consonant sounds you can target with the characters in this book, too.. I have a lot of little ones working on /p, b/ sounds, so this book is perfect for them! Purple cat, Brown Bear, Red Bird, Blue Horse, Black Sheep…  I have a lot of kids working on /t, d/, too, so we practiced red bird, white dog, goldfish, purple cat, and yellow duck! (and “water” too when talking about where ducks and frogs might live!).

Brown Bear Roll & Cover:
We used this Brown Bear Roll & Cover page from Making Learning Fun during group artic sessions.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  The kids would roll the die, and say their speech words the same number of times as the number on their die before coloring the animal. Perfect for groups of 2, so one kid could color while the other practiced, and vice-versa.                                                                                                                        A way to get more repetitions out this is after printing out one copy, use white-out on the duplicates of 2 & 3 and instead write 5 & 6 before making more copies, so there’s duplicates of the higher numbers rather than the lower numbers– more opportunities for increased repetitions!

                                                                                                                                I used these Brown Bear animal cards from 1plus1plus1equalsone’s free printable pack to play “Memory” to target vocabulary.  You could have them match up the animals together, or use pictures of the different animal homes (i.e. cave, pond, farm, etc…) and have them match up the animal to its home.

Work on increasing MLU by having them use a carrier phrase, like “I found….” or tell you the animal sound when they flip over a picture (i.e. “Cat says meow.” “Frog says ribbit!”)

In this picture we were working on speech sounds (I had a group of 2; 1 working on k&g and another working on s-blends).  I had them pull a card, say the word 5x, and then stick it on the bear.  When all of the cards were on there, I had them find a word they had practiced, pull it off, and say it 5x before handing it to me.

I also used it to target associations.  I picked out pairs of cards, had 1 set taped to the bear and 1 set on the floor on the other side of the room.  They had to pull a card off the bear and walk over to the cards on the floor to find the item that belonged with the card on their hand, and then tell me how the items were alike.

You could also work on concepts like /top, middle, bottom/ with the bear by having them put various pictures on different areas of the bear.

Carrier phrases like “Put on ___” or “Take off ____” work well for this, too! Use for increasing MLU or for any apraxic kiddos who you’re using carrier phrases with!

Image Spinner App:  After seeing this Brown Bear post from Speech Room News, I grabbed the Image Spinner App for my iPad (99 cents in the iTunes store).

                                                                                                   
For artic, I had my /p, b, t, d/ kids practice their speech sounds by spinning and saying the names of the characters they landed on.  

For vocab, I had them spin the spinner, tell me the name of the animal, and find the matching picture that was taped up to the big brown bear on the wall (using the cards from the printable pack I mentioned above).  I targeted WH questions by asking them questions about where the animals lived, what sound they make, what they eat, etc…

Another great resource to check out is the Brown Bear Companion Pack from Putting Words In Your Mouth.  I grabbed this during the TeachersPayTeachers back to school sale, and it is FANTASTIC for following directions and basic concepts!




Other ideas:

• Sort items by features (i.e. 4 legs vs 2 legs, fur/no fur, feathers vs fur, etc..)
• Target verbs by having students act out each animal (i.e. hop like a frog, bear crawl, fly like a bird).  You could also lay cards out on the floor or taped to the wall and have them spin the spinner, and act out that animal as they move to the card(s).

What are your favorite things to do in therapy with this book??