Bill Martin, Jr. Books

My friend at Teaching Tiny Tots used the Bill Martin, Jr. books in her lesson plans for her daughter this week. I have been wanting to do some activities, using those books, with Arin, so I decided to take my friend's lead and jump on board with the acitivities. We went to the library and checked out the books:

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?

Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?

Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?

Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?

We ran out of time before finishing all of the activities that I had planned, but we had fun with what we did. The last two pages of each of the books have small pictures of each of the animals mentioned in the book. So I made two color copies of these pages. Then, I cut around each animal. Arin helped me glue (we used glue sticks) the animal pictures onto colored index cards. Then, she picked out popsicle sticks and I taped one stick to the back of each card. Once we were finished with that, we used the animals to play "Go Fish". I put the popsicle sticks on the backs of the cards because I thought it would make them easier to hold. It didn't. They were still bulky. Arin has played "Go Fish" only a couple of times and I am not sure that she fully grasps the concept yet. So I had her sit on my lap and I helped her play the game with her daddy. He won, but it was a close game: 15 to 12.

After we played "Go Fish", I laid out several of the animal cards in three rows. I gave Arin matching cards. She had a great time matching the cards up. She was so proud of herself everytime she found a match!

Then, the camera battery died, so I didn't get pictures of any of the next game. Andy piled all of the picture cards together. Then, he'd pick out one card and Arin had to dig through the pile to find the match. She still did really well with this version, even though they were not in nice neat rows in front of her.