The Mitten

After the winter break, we read "The Mitten", by Jan Brett. It is a Ukrainian folk tale about a little boy who loses a mitten in the snow. Many forest animals decide to move in and the mitten gets so big that when a mouse decides to move in too a very surprising event happens.

We created several mini books. This book is sung to the tune of "Farmer in the Dell". The students all loved this book!

Each student created their own storytelling pieces. We practiced telling the story at circle times.

Over the last few weeks, we have been reading many different books about forest animals. We have taken a closer look at several animals.
We looked at the characteristics of the brown bear, his habitat, his diet and the life cycle. Because most of the students cannot read, we try to add in lots of pictures.

After focusing on the bear, we looked at the hedgehog.

To help us remember the information, we have been singing songs about these animals. The hedgehog song is to the tune of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider".

The Brown bear song is to the tune of "Farmer and the Dell."

Bear Snores On

In December, we read "Bear Snores On" by Karma Wilson. In the story, several forest animals one by one enter the cave of the sleeping bear to escape the weather outside. Each animal brings a little something and soon a party is going on. Eventually, they wake up the bear which makes for an exciting ending.

Ms. Deb, Dina and Fay created a board outside of our classroom to introduce the story. Each student decorated a snowman and add their face to which were put on the board.

Our bear is nice and warm under his quilt. A follow up story we read was also by Karma Wilson entitled "Bear Stays Up for Christmas". In this story, bear is gifted the blanket.

One of the projects was for each student to make their own cave. We ripped black, gray, green and yellow papers for the project. Then we added a die cut bear.