03/06/2022
Brown Bear Parent Language Activity
Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a happy mommy playing with me! Many of us grew up with the familiar refrain from Eric Carle’s famous Brown Bear book. The book was first published over 50 years ago, and it is truly a timeless classic in children’s literature. One of my most favorite activities that I like to do with my clients is reading and “acting out” traits of the various characters introduced in the book. The children love the mixture of a reading activity paired with movement. The activity goes like this: Everyone sits together in a circle or bunch (depending on how many are playing) and as a new character is introduced everyone jumps to their feet and begins acting out a familiar detail about the revealed character. For example, the brown bear first sees a red bird so up jumps the children as they pretend to fly like red birds (usually by holding out their arms and flapping their “wings”) while running in a circle around the room and coming right back to their seat to read the next page. Other characters we like to use include crawling on all fours and meowing like the purple cat or barking like the white dog, neighing and snorting like the blue horse, and swimming like a gold fish (squeezing in your cheeks to make fish lips isn’t easy for everyone to do…so we make fish lips but we add in swimming with our arms so that the kiddos will have at least one action they can perform easily). Continue reading as you act out the next character until you’ve made it through them all. There is no script here so you can use whatever trait you would like to act out, so be creative. This activity is great for building pre-reading skills such as repetition, making predictions, and identifying characters and story details. In addition, knowledge skills and categories of information such as colors and animals are also teachable items. Using various color prompts (color cards, die, crayons), I like to ask basic questions such as “who was purple?” or “what sound did the black animal make?” and have the kids either point to or say the answer. This reading activity is lots of fun and I know you and your child will enjoy it as much as I do!
This early-language development activity is one of the many fun things we do at the Crossroads Speech and SPED Clinic! Come join us!
