Sunday, January 29, 2012

A "beary" roaring good time - we' re going on a bear hunt homeschool unit!

I love performing arts especially musicals and plays. I like watching stories come alive especially from my favourite books. There's so much going on in a play that never fails to engage me - music, lights and the punchlines from the actors.

Dumpling and I started going for plays when she was about 2 I think. As Dumpling loves books, I thought that it would be nice to bring her along to experience "theatre". To my surprise, she enjoyed it so much that she would cry at the end of every play!

So, it then became a habit to bring her for such performances whenever it reaches the sunny shores here. To make it more relevant and enjoyable for Dumpling, we often do a unit study on it prior to watching it. With "We're going on a bear hunt", our homeschool unit study was relatively quick as she has read the book before almost a year ago when we used some lapbook materials from homeschool share.

These are some of the pictures taken last March.



Story Sequencing


Learning about prepositions


The wonderful thing about lapbooking is that the elements can be kept and reused again and this is exactly what we did this year. However, as Dumpling is now older, I was on the hunt for more age-appropriate materials and I was blessed with more homeschool resources on this book from homeschool creations which had more preschool level elements. Additionally, between a few friends, we did an exercise called "homeschool swop" where each of us prepares a unit and we swop! One of the packs I was blessed with was on this very same story too. :)

We had loads of fun and inspired by Totally Tots, I decided to take some of the activities outdoors too. Here's Dumpling in action.

Picking up pebbles and making swishy swashy sounds :)



Our resources


Instead of using story sequencing cards, I encouraged Dumpling to build her own scenes 



Uh oh! Thick oozy mud!


Stumble trip


Swirling whirling snowstorm!


Oh no! Its a bear! LOL


Literacy bit: beginning sounds


Literacy (reading and matching of sentences to scenes) and reinforcement on Ordinal Numbers


More math bit (this was part of the homeschool swop exercise). "Adding on" using number line



Numberline with a twist for some kinesthetic fun!


We caught the play earlier in the morning and it was extremely enjoyable. While it did not have as much adult humour as Gruffalo (which we watched last year around this time), the play was definitely entertaining and was very interactive.

While props were simple


Comic timing was great!


But the best part for me personally is the interaction the cast has with the audience. Here, Dumpling took cover under the poster. You will need to watch it to understand what she was hiding from. LOL


All in all, another GREAT homeschooling unit! Loooooooviiiiiiiiinnnnngggg it!!!!

Read about another blogger mum's Bear Hunt activity here

Edit:
I forgot to add on a YouTube clip of the author narrating the story! Here you go:



6 comments:

  1. LOVE how you had her recreate the story. The little twig trees are great!! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for alerting me, sweetie!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks Jolanthe. :) All thanks to your Preschool pack, Dumpling had a great time home learning leading up to the play. :) Looking forward to using more and sharing more with you too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Shirley: Hope you enjoy the play. Do download the pack from Jolanthe (I provided the link in my post) for your Missy! Dumpling loves it! :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi, Great ideas :)! Where did you find the character pictures to stick on lolly pop sticks? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi Leahx,

    Thanks for visiting my blog. You can either scan the image on your own or you can do a google search then paste the image into a word / powerpoint document. I did the latter and there after, all I had to do was to print them out and cut them. :)

    ReplyDelete