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: