Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?’ by Bill Martin Jnr and Eric Carle is a much loved story in our house. The rhyming and repetition of the language is fantastic for children of all ages to develop their language and early reading skills. Read more about this here.
I have wanted to create an activity around this story for such a long time but struggled to come up with a great idea. When I was teaching my best ideas came when I was getting ready for work and this idea popped into my head while I was straightening my hair!
This sensory literacy activity idea for toddlers, babies and children will have them exploring, playing and learning.
Set Up
I am not going to lie but this sensory literacy activity based on the classic story ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?’ did take me a little more time to set up but honestly it was worth it to see my son’s reaction to the activity. I was also immensely proud of what I had created. I collected all the animals that we already had; the brown bear, the frog (finger puppet from Ikea, a bath duck. I used the mirror for the children so my 2 year old could look at himself and I was the teacher.
In the morning, I dyed sugar and rice into the different colours I needed for the animals and used porridge oats for the white dog. I had planned to use desiccated coconut for the dog but I didn’t have enough.
To create the animals shapes I drew them onto a piece of paper and then cut the middle out to give me a template. I put the template down on the tuff tray and then poured the rice / sugar / porridge oats into the template and then carefully lifted the template up to reveal the image.
My two year old immediately knew what he was looking at before I started reading the story ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?’ and listed all the animals; “blue horse,” “red bird…” He was initially so careful with the animals that I had made and wasn’t really interested in the duck, frog or mirror. My toddler did however take the brown bear to greet each of the animals I had made.
Although this sensory literacy activity idea for toddlers, babies and children took more time than normal to set up it was worth it to listen to my 2 year old language, watch him use his imagination and fall in love a little bit more with stories.