Arts Infused Unit Plan: Monday- Book: "Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see?"

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?

Big Book: Introduce this book unit using the Big Book. Point to the words as you read. After one or two readings, encourage students to read along with you, especially the parts that are repeated throughout the book. Some of the students will want to "read along" almost from the moment you start reading, especially if they're familiar with the book. I always ask that the students not read along during the first reading so that those who haven't heard the book before will be able to hear the text clearly.

I don't have the Brown Bear Big Book. I'm printing out the text and gluing it along with the colored pictures that I printed out onto cardstock. I'm also going to add the text to the pages just like I did in the emergent reader so that the student doesn't have to guess or memorize what picture comes next. The text will be cued by the picture. Then I'm going to have the whole thing laminated before I put it together. (Don't forget to make smaller pictures for the last page like I did.) I was going to staple the pages together or tie them together with yarn. The latter, I know, works well for posterboard Big Books.

Directions for Big Book
First, lay the last page of your book on the table, the back of the book facing down. Take a long strip of clear packing tape and tape half over the side of the page where you want to bind (the left side on the book above) and the other half will be stuck to the table. Press the tape down on the book, but not on the table (you're just going to have to pull it off the table later anyway). Next, lay your next to the last page on top of that page and repeat the process, making sure to keep all the pages straight and even. (You may need a helper, I did) Keep doing this until the last page is your cover. Then gently pull the layered tape and book pages from the table and stretch the tape that's sticking out on the left side towards the back of the book creating your binding.
Class Big Book: Print out the black and white pictures from DLTK and have students paint or color them to make an additional Big Book for your class.
(Language Arts**) Vocabulary: Create word cards with the accompanying pictures for a portable Thematic Word Wall. Once you've made the cards, display them in a pocketchart. Students can use them to match text, match words to pictures, and for use in their writing.

red bird	brown bear	yellow duck	white dog	blue horse
green frog	purple cat	black sheep	goldfish	teacher
children	red	yellow	white	blue
green	purple	black	bird	bear
duck	dog	frog	cat	sheep

Brown Bear Mascot: Purchase an inexpensive brown bear and use him to increase appropriate school behavior. He can sit at the table of a student or students who are exhibiting appropriate behavior.

(Language Arts**) Reading Buddy: You can also place a stuffed brown bear in your Reading Center. Students can then sit and read to Brown Bear. This may help to increase their retelling/reading of stories as they'll be reading out loud so that he can hear them. :)

Brown Bear Introduction to Staff: Use the story format to introduce students to school staff. An example would be:

Mrs. ______, Mrs. ______, who do you see? I think Mrs. ______ is looking at me. Insert the appropriate names and pictures on each page.

Sequencing: Provide students with picture cards of things in the book. Have them practice sequencing them as to how they came up in the book.

For this activity we used the book and glued pictures onto a sentence strip.

Patterns: Use small pictures of things from the book to practice patterning with your students.

AB= brown bear, red bird, brown bear, red bird

ABC= yellow duck, blue horse, green frog, yellow duck, blue horse, green frog,

etc.

(Math**) Pattern Hat: Use the same pictures from above and have students glue them onto a sentence strip. When they're dry, fit the sentence strip to their head and staple it (but not to their head :) ).

What's Missing?: Display the flannelboard characters from the book. Then have the students put their head down. Stand in front of the flannelboard and remove two or three of the pictures. Have them look at the board and guess which ones are missing. You can make the game increasingly more difficult by decreasing the number of characters that you remove. The most difficult activity would be to guess which ONE character is missing.

Categorizing: Have students categorize each animal in the book into 3 categories:

No legs	2 legs	4 legs
goldfish	bird	bear

They can categorize them by picture or with the words, depending on their reading ability. You can create the table above on posterboard, a file folder, or cardstock, depending on the size of your pictures/words. If using pictures, you can also have the words written underneath the picture to reinforce the written vocabulary. Laminate everything for durability.

(**Visual Arts) Storybook Walk: Divide the students into groups of 2-3 students. Have enlarged printouts of each animal in the story and have students work together to decorate them. Cut them out. Display in the correct sequence around the walls of the classroom. Students can walk around the room and retell the story as they walk.

(**Visual Arts) Memory Game: Place a picture of each book character around the edge of a circle cut from posterboard. (Place the pictures in a random order, not sequentially.) Laminate, then place a spinner in the middle of the circle. Have students take turns spinning the spinner. When the spinner points to a character, they must tell what that character saw next in the book.

(Math**) Problems: Use the storybook characters to create math problems. Brown Bear saw 2 black sheep and 1 goldfish. How many did he see in all?

(Math**) Sorting/Graphing: Have students bring their own bears to school, then sort/graph them by color.

(**Drama) Role Play: Print out the colored pics onto cardstock and laminate. Add yarn to create a necklace. Issue each student a character and have them act out the story as you read it.

Cut out each animal and tape it to a popsicle stick or an unsharpened pencil.
If working with a group of children, each one can be a certain animal.
- When their part of the story comes up, they can wiggle around the puppet and either chant their section of the story or make the animal sound.
- You can have an animal parade... Line the children up in the order they are mentioned in the story and let them march around the room, waving their puppets.
Animal sounds: As you color the pictures, talk about each animal. What sound does the animal make? Where does the animal live? Has the child ever seen that animal?
Color recognition: First, ask all the bears to stand up and wave their puppets (or make their animal sound), then all the birds, etc. Then ask all the people with BROWN animals to stand up, then all the RED animals, etc.

(**MUSIC) -Choral Reading: Have students read the book together as a group and record them reading it. Then place the tape and the book in the Listening Center. This is a big hit with the kids! :)

Crayon Game: Have each student get out one crayon for each color in the book (brown, red, yellow, blue, green, purple, white, black). Flash a color word to the group and have the students raise the appropriate crayon to match the color word. You can tell at a glance who still needs additional help with their color words.

(Science**) Brown Bear Tasting: Provide each student with a taste of foods matching the colors in the book:

brown - chocolate pudding, Hersey Kiss, cookie

red - strawberry, cherry, Red Hot

yellow - cheese

blue - blueberry

green - grape

white - milk, crustless bread, frosting, cream cheese, sour cream, grits

black - Oreo, black olive, jelly bean

purple - grape juice, jelly bean

Sound Sort: For more advanced students, have them sort pictures onto pictures of the story character if they begin with the same sound. For example, provide them with either a picture of the bear or the bird (/b/), the duck or the dog /d/, frog /f/, horse /h/, cat /c/, teacher /t/, goldfish /g/ <watch out for those who'll want to call it a "fish" ... wrong sound>, and then for really advanced students, sheep /sh/, and children /ch/. The student will sort provided picture cards onto the picture with the same beginning sound.

Estimation: Provide each student with a blackline shape of Brown Bear. Have them guess how many M&Ms it would take to cover the bear. Graph their responses. Then provide M&Ms for each student to cover their bear. See which student came closest in their estimation.

Real or Make-Believe: One of our benchmark objectives is for students (K or 1st, I can't remember) identify "real" or "make-believe". Scan the pictures from the book, laminate, and provide them along with corresponding real animal pictures that have also been laminated. Prepare two workmats. One with a "real" scene at the top, and the other with a "make-believe" scene at the top. Laminate. Have the students sort the animal pictures into "Real" and "Make-Believe".

New Quilt: I used Brown Bear again this year as part of a Bear Unit that I'm doing with some kindergarteners and I wanted to redesign the quilt. So I decided that I'd have them create the Brown Bear square again because he's so cute and that's good cutting and following directions practice, but then have them choose and paint their favorite character from the book as the alternate square. And what kindergartener doesn't like to paint!?! :) So that's what we did and I think it turned out cute!

Of course the alternate quilt square patterns that we used for the favorite character came from DLTK! I just downloaded and resized them to fit on a 9x9 square of white paper. Cut out and mounted them onto the square. The small parts like feet, beak, bubbles, etc. they colored with crayons.

Graphing: After the children chose their favorite characters, I created a graph so that we could graph the favorite Brown Bear character. Once the quilt was hung in the hallway, the children were each given their own graph and a clipboard and went in the hallway for class. That in itself was neat! :) There we discussed the results of quilt by talking about how many people chose the red bird as their favorite character, the blue horse?, the purple cat?, the goldfish? Then we talked about getting that information onto our graph and graphing the results. I did a model graph with them to how them how it was done. They had been instructed to bring along only the colors they needed, so then they colored their animals and completed their graph independently without the aid of the model graph.

If doing this again, I would not include Brown Bear in the graph or allow him to be chosen as a favorite character. The students were easily confused between the favorite character squares and the Brown Bear squares. They wanted to count all the Brown Bear squares as a "favorite character."

Hallway Display: This is how our hallway looks at the moment for our Bear Unit. This is all our Brown Bear stuff.

We're "Bear"y Excited About Learning!

Beginning Sounds: I created these picture cards from the story and then the matching beginning sound cards. We fudged a little and used "f" for "fish" and "k" for "kids" instead of "children". Then I put the pictures on my magnetic board (oil drip pan) and they matched the sounds to the picture.

Beginning Sounds Printable: If the students were having trouble getting the beginning sounds that they know down on paper, this matching activity sheet(s) would help them practice that.

4 Square Writing: With more advanced kids, they would write about each picture, but with younger grades, we practice saying a complete sentence about each picture. I would say to the students, "Tell me a sentence with Blue Horse."