"Bear"y Fun!

This week our unit is on the Smoky Mountains.  We have several books about the mountains and the animals who live there.  We read about Black Bears yesterday and did a lot of circle time activities about bears.  It was lots of fun!  It included: "The Bear Went Over the Mountain", "Going on a Bear Hunt" - which is a favorite now!, "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" and a couple of other silly sing songs.  What fun!  I love circle time the most during the day.  We get to let loose a bit.  I am even doing a short circle time at the end of the day just to close things out.  After we did shelf work yesterday the kids started their art project, which was a black bear mask.  I did not have any black plates so we used a white one.  I also didn't have any black paint (wow I am not prepared at all, am I?!) so we used a few different dark browns together ::side note- black bears are not always black.  They can be tan, brown and golden.  Who knew?! ::end side note:: and came up with a great dark shade of brown.  The kids painted their plates...

While we were waiting on the plates to dry I gathered up all kinds of small things in our manipulatives containers and dumped them into 2 piles.  I then got each one of the kids a dozen and a half egg carton, a plastic spoon and fork, tweezers and a half of a plastic egg.  I instructed them to pick up the things on the floor and sort them into the carton.  Here is how it went...

Here are the piles and the kids getting started.

Turns out tweezers were the favorite tool and the spoon was the least favorite.  I thought the spoon would rank much higher than that.

As you can see, S sorted only by item type.

N tweezing his items into his container. 

He took this project very seriously and sorted each thing out by color and type.

This project kept them busy for almost an hour!  I couldn't believe it.  I think it will be done a bit more often with different things thrown in the mix and different "picker uppers".  I love seeing how each child has their own ways of doing things.

Finally the bears were dry enough to put together.  I didn't get to take pics of the process because I was busy being glue monitor.  But here is the final result...

S gave hers a hair bow and a very large mouth.  N (which is not pictured) gave his a bow tie.  They are both darling.  I am so happy we did this craft.

Have a blessed day.