Going on a Bear Hunt: Read and Reenact to Build Gross Motor Skills

Baby bookworm and I not only check out books from the library, but also lots of CDs.  As having a baby gives me an excuse to relive my childhood, at some point in time I had checked out a classic version (i.e., 70s or 80s) of Sesame Street songs.  Not really to my surprise, baby bookworm took to these songs, despite their being decades old.  Recently, though, after listening to a song on this CD sung by Grover called Over, Under, Around, and Through....I thought, wow, that reminds me of that book We're Going On A Bear Hunt  (I'm constantly looking for inspiration and connections from our daily lives that I can reinforce through books). I can CLEARLY remember sitting at circle time chanting We're Going On A Bear Hunt in my first grade class with my teacher, Miss Custer.  So at this week's trip to the library, I decided to revisit this fun, chanty, sing-a-long kind of story with an element of excitement.  My learning agenda with this book was threefold: I could reinforce those prepositional words from Grover's song (i.e., enhance vocabulary/comprehension), further develop her gross motor skills in a fun way by recreating our own bear hunt, and teach her about onomatopoeic words. So, alas, here we are going on a bear hunt....and he's our learning experience.

Of course, as I have mentioned in my Read Aloud Tips, I always read the book through at least once with no learning agenda so that I don't disrupt the flow of the book and baby bookworm can get acquainted with the story and characters.  I tried the first and third objectives below on the second read through.  The second objective was more of a reenactment of the story and I didn't try to "read" the book at the same time....we did it from memory. 

1) Comprehension/Vocabulary - The words over, under, and through are used frequently throughout the story because the story line is repetitive in nature (which makes this a great book for infants, toddlers, and school-aged children).  Rather than just reading these words, I specifically pointed them out to my baby bookworm.  So, for instance, in the story when they get to the river and say, "we can't go OVER it"...I put real emphasis on the word OVER and asked her to repeat it (she's really getting the hang of this talking thing).  Then I basically had a conversation with myself (using some dialogic reading techniques), "how would they go OVER the river?" "When do we go OVER rivers? How?" Then I did the same sort of thing with under and through...

2). Gross Motor Skills - Let's face it, most people (and kids) learn by doing.  Learning theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky have long suggested that taking an active, rather than passive, role in learning is critical to the process of acquiring new knowledge (this is known as a constructivist view of learning).  So, I decided to act out the story with my baby bookworm so that she would actually be going OVER, UNDER, and THROUGH....  I got my inspiration for this activity from a great book called Read! Move! Learn! Active Stories for Active Learning by Carol Totsky Hammett and Nicki Collins Geigert.  Baby bookworm and I created a river (which was really her bathtub filled with water and a toy fish and crab), a snowstorm (which was really bubbles), we pretended we came across mud and took our shoes and socks off to go THROUGH the mud, a cave (made out of a dark basket with a bear, of course), and then we climbed UNDER our covers like in the book, to get away from the bear.  This is just what I had around, but use your own imagination to create a bear hunt that caters to your child.  She had lots of fun climbing over, under, and through (while at the same time enhancing motor skills).

Our "river"

Our "cave" and bear

Back to safety under the covers like in the picture in the book (shown below)

From some Baby Einstein flashcards we have....it has great information about bears we read on the back of the card

3). Onomatopoeic words - Each time the characters in this book go THROUGH something (like the river) it makes a fun sound (e.g., splash, splosh!).  Baby bookworm and I had a blast saying these words, and they helped her to learn about letter blends in words. 

I hope you all "catch a big one"!

Nursery Rhymes: Helping Your Child to Build Critical Reading Readiness Skills

As a child I LOVED nursery rhymes and I credit this in part to a truly magical place known as Story Book Forest located in Idlewild, a small amusement park.  For a baby bookworm like myself, Story Book Forest was one of the coolest places on earth.  Nestled in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania, it is a place where the nursery rhymes literally come to life.  Here are pictures from a recent visit of some of the classic nursery rhymes.

Jack and Jill

Humpty Dumpty

Hickory Dickory Dock

Old King Cole

So, having had this childhood love (and slight obsession really) with nursery rhymes, I had to get baby bookworm a copy of "The Real" Mother Goose - the same book of nursery rhymes that I had as a young girl.  She not only needed this book so that when we took that first trip to Idlewild Park she would recognize some of mommy's favorite rhymes, but turns out, she needed it because nursery rhymes aid in a child's development of phonemic awareness. And mommy bookworm knew that, and now so do you.  But why is that important?  Well, phonemic awareness, or the ability to distinguish the sounds within words, can be learned through rhyming words.  More importantly, phonemic awareness happens to be related to reading ability. So Mother Goose is really a win win situation for my baby bookworm and yours!

I try to read a few nursery rhymes to baby bookworm each day.  She seems to love them, no doubt thanks to their sing-songy silliness.  Now that baby bookworm is a little older, I have been trying to specifically point out the rhyming words to her, and we even go over them on a chalkboard.  If your child is even older than mine, maybe he or she can think up their own original nursery rhyme.

Here are a few of our favorite collections:

The Real Mother Goose
Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright
This is a very complete collection of some very well known, and less well known nursery rhymes.

My First Real Mother Goose Board Book
Written and Illustrated by Blanche F. Wright

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: And Other Favorite Bedtime Rhymes (Board Book)
Illustrated by Sanja Rescek

Humpty Dumpty and Other Nursery Rhymes
Better Than Broccoli Books

Here's a few other books with great children's rhymes:

A Children's Book of Verse
Illustrated by Eric Kincaid
A collection of children's poetry accompanied by beautiful illustrations.

Poems for the Very Young
Selected by Michael Rosen and Illustrated by Bob Graham

A colorful collection of poetry and rhymes including both classic and modern writers.