Our Bear Unit

Bears, Bears Bears

We spent this whole week learning about Bears, habitats, and hibernating. I plan on continuing this unit into next week because there is so much I wanted to get to but we ran out of time. I am working on including our 4 year old into most of our schooling and this also includes the 3 year old I babysit a few days a week. So in addition to the Bear study I'm doing with Zoe I planned all kinds of fun learning activities to do with all of them.

After our usual Bible Time, we started the first morning out with a song. I had each of my children find a teddy bear for us to keep in our school room all week to play and work with. They enjoyed telling their bears to wake up at the end of the song

Bears are sleeping (Tune: Brother John)

Bears are sleeping.

Bears are Sleeping.

In their Lairs.

In their Lairs.

Soon it will be springtime,

Soon it will be springtime,

Wake up Bears!

Wake up Bears!

We then measured our bears with unifix cubes and discussed whose bears was the longest.

We played a quick game of hide and seek with our Teddy Bears. The loved doing this!

We read the story Corduroy and did a button sorting activity

Our art project for the day was them gluing overalls and buttons on their own Corduroy.

We had a story sequencing activity.

The next day we did a Gummy Bear sorting activity. They each had to sort a handful of gummy bears on a sorting map. Then we each counted how much of each color we had, we made a chart on the wipe board. Zoe had her own chart that she counted them up on.



We did a teddy bear weighing activity. I had several objects that they weighed using teddy bears. Zoe then colored how many teddy bears it took each object to equal out on the scale.


She then cut out the colored bears and placed them in order from lightest to heaviest (in case your wondering this is an AIMS activity)


One of the days we sorted teddy grahams and charted those as well. I don't know if you knew this but you can sort teddy grahams by- arms up, arms down, round tummy, flat tummy, feet together and feet apart.

We finished up bears for the week by reading through the We're going on a Bear Hunt story. After reading through it once and doing the actions, they wanted to hide their bears and pretend like we were going to hunt them. You can find one of the adaptations for this story here

I am going to post on some of the other things we are doing for Bears more specifically with Zoe our kindergartner on another day.

If you are looking for some other great Tot learning ideas check out 1+1 =1

Trying to get the hang of it

Well, we are now through one semester of homeschooling. As a whole I think it's gone well. I feel like we could have done more and been more productive but I'm not beating myself up for it, I know that we are still further ahead then where she would be if she was at an away from home school. But still I had hoped for more. We are using Sonlight as our curriculum but to be honest thus far I'm not loving it. I think I'm willing to give it another year before I completely ditch it, but I am leaning more toward a unit study approach. I love the Five in a Row curriculum, but I also feel like I need just a little more than what it offers. So I'm playing around with a few ideas. I have always wanted to write curriculum, planning was always my favorite thing to do as a public school teacher, so I might even put together my own curriculum for next year- who knows? Right now my focus is on trying to make school more fun while still maintaining a learning atmosphere. We won't officially start this next semester until This coming Monday- I need to get to work!