Bears, Oh My!

Three little girls came to the morning session today, and one to the evening session. After singing our opening song we jumped right in to learn about real bears. The book, Bears by Patrick Merrick, helped me with a "talk through" of some bear facts.

The girls were each given a set of cards with pictures of different bears on them. As we talked about bears in the book they did a good job of finding the same bear on their cards. We discussed what bears eat, where they sleep, that they sleep for most of the winter, how they care for their babies and how big they are, yet they have small eyes and ears. A difficult concept for the girls was to realize that bears are not cuddly, friendly creatures... as teddy bears might be. I think it helped convince them a bit when they saw pictures of bears' huge claws and sharp teeth.

Even baby sister joined in for some of the stories.

At the craft table the girls were given a bear outline on heavy cardstock. After attaching some sticky-backed wiggle eyes and a black nose they covered the bear with a thick coat of liquid glue and then applied ground coffee beans and pressed them into the glue.

We did this in small segments and ended up with some cute black bears.

After washing our hands [and reviewing the song about washing away germs from last week],

We came back to hear a cute book about a "hibernating" bear [we also learned that bears don't truly hibernate, but just go into a deep sleep] called Old Bear by Kevin Henkes. This old bear sleeps and dreams of the passing seasons, and when he gets to Spring, looks out of his den to discover he isn't dreaming after all!  It gave us a good chance to talk about the seasons and that we are entering into Spring right now, and what signs of spring we can look for in the next few weeks.

We then sang a song to the tune of Fre`re Jacques. The children were given a copy to take home, and it goes like this:

Bear is sleeping, bear is sleeping,

In his cave, in his cave.

Wonder when he'll wake up?  Wonder when he'll wake up?

In the Spring!  In the Spring!

We also talked about fun, harmless bears called Teddy Bears and the children were shown four different ones that I had brought. They also had some fun hugging and arranging them.

Our final book of the morning was another true bear book called Bears: A First Discovery Book by Gallimard Jeunesse. This book had more interesting facts about bears and some very nice clear overlay pages that allowed us to see a Giant Panda [not a bear!] nurse her cub, a bear curl up in its den, a bear get a bee nest out of a tree, and more. There were some "Yucks!" over the fact that bears eat bugs and especially grubs.

The morning ended with the children having some "bear snacks". [One little girl worried that they were going to be worms or bugs!]. We tasted some nuts, dried cranberries, crackers and honey. There were also a couple more handouts for our take-home folders.

Come join us next week when we will explore mice together.

Children's Librarian,

Mitzi