The theme for November’s story time was Hibernation. Since it is getting very cold and snowy, it was the perfect time to discuss where animals spend their winter break! To greet our friends, we had a visit from our puppet friend, Mr. Brown the bear. He gave high fives and read along with us.
We began with “Bear Has A Story To Tell” by Erin and Philip Stead. This book gave us an idea of some animals that hibernate in the winter and how they do. The kids enjoyed this story because they were waiting to find out what Bear’s story was going to be. It was unique because the end of the book repeated what the beginning was, leaving the readers with the fact that Bear truly forgot his story!
After our first story, we went went on an adventure… a bear hunt! Without moving from our seats, we did an action game full of hand movements and noise to do an imaginary bear hunt. We climbed trees, walked through wheat fields and tip toed into caves. Unfortunately, we woke the bear and had to quickly use our movements and noises to get back to safety.
When we got back to safety, we read our second book. “Don’t Wake The Bear!” by Marjorie Dennis Murray was a good book to give us more ideas of animals that hibernate during winter and which ones do not.
The second book guided our friends to our activity. We created our own animals and their own homes for them to hibernate in. Our stories gave us a few ideas. However, students got even more creative and came up with their own animals. We used clay to make the animals. The clay air-dried and our friends took them home so they could paint or color them later. The homes were made out of small paper bags, scrap paper, and crayons to decorate.
Nice story.