Brown Bear, Brown Bear Week {Monday}

Our first week of pre--school was basically about the routine and getting to know the students. Now that I know my group better and what their skill levels are (aside from just reading about them on paper), I can begin to plan in some more structured activities to our day. This will be a gradual increase.

This week, all of our large group activities will be based around "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?" I say large group, but I'll be honest. We only have 3 kids during large group time. It falls in between our morning kids going home and our afternoon kids coming in. Only the full day kids are still there for large group.

Here is something new we will be doing. On Mondays, we will read the book/story for the week. Tuesday will be a movement activity, Wednesday an art activity, and Thursday a music activity. All following along with the text/theme.

So today we read "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?" with adaptive text and storyboards for the students to follow along with. I posted on my instagram over the weekend of the book being converted. I found this idea on pinterest and the person who posted it has a few adapted books available on her blog for free. You can click {here} to download the images for brown bear and see the other books she has available.

With the skill level of this years group I am loving this accommodation. I will also pass out storyboards while we are reading. These help the students stay engaged and follow along with the text. Maybe with the same images on the pages of the book itself it will make following along with the storyboard even easier.

If you are interested in the storyboards you can check them out {here}. I didn't make them myself. I found this amazing file about 2 years ago and it has a decent amount of books included. I've since made a few storyboards myself to go with other books. It looks like she no longer has them as one large bundle, and instead is selling them in groups of 2. BUMMER! But the link will still take you to all of the options she has. {Yes, the black sheep is missing from the boards. Maybe she's since corrected that--I should probably check!}

And lastly, we will re-tell the story using these little "puppets". They aren't actually puppets, but I don't know what else to call them. I have a few sets of these in my classroom for a handful of books and our library has about 20 sets that we can check out. I know "back in the day" these were super popular with felt boards. I'm pretty sure felt boards are a thing of the past in most classrooms, but I'm taking it old school! I made myself a felt board this weekend and plan on using it a lot with this years group!

I hope you'll come back tomorrow to see what we did for Brown Bear Week on Tuesday! Have any fun ideas/activities you like to do with your group for Brown Bear, Brown Bear?