B is for Brown Bear, Brown Bear: Library Notes

                              Brown Bear, Brown Bear  What do you See? 

                                 Written by Bill Martin Jr and Eric Carle                                                                     

What are some reasons why I chose this book for your consideration?  What makes it so good?

*The predictability and repetition found in the text are great literacy tools for young children.

*The book is good for memory building. Do you remember what animal    the red bird sees?

*It is good for story retelling, another memory building activity.  

*It is good for early reading skills as the text is simple and patterned with the key words evident on the page eg."I see a blue horse looking at me."

*This is a simple book that helps to label colours and animals.    Other than a blue horse and a purple cat, they mostly make sense but if you forget some of the words as you try to share it, just make them up!

It is great to use the phrases in this book to extend the question to the child, "And what do you see?" This allows you to talk about the things in your world. You can use this phrase or chant which can be memorized and shared at random moments to build interactive communication with your child.  See some examples below.

Ok, so now you are visiting on a farm!  Take the familiar pattern of the book and ask your child, "Child, child (can use child's name instead), what do you see?  I see a brown cow looking at me!"  Then you can go on to talk about the brown cow, the colours of the other cows, how many there are, what they eat, what foods they produce for us and so on. Carry this on with the other farm animals to create a memorable text to life scenario.

If you go to the pet store you could say, "Child, child what do you see?  I see an orange fish looking at me!"  This is true if you are in the orange goldfish section but if you are not, then maybe your child will surprise you and either guide you to the orange fish or correct you and name the colour of the fish in front of you.  This can open up a conversation about fish.

If you go to the forest you may ask, "Child, child, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me."  Then ask them what kind of bird that could be.  Do they see it? Can we spot any other birds?  What colour are they?

Could you spy a yellow duck or a green frog at the pond?  A brown bear at the zoo?. For any situation like this you can use the book's pattern to trigger a conversation that can branch off to broader discussions like the life cycle of an animal or their habitats and so forth.

*You can also take a book like this to practice colouring animals and follow the directions of the book to select the same colours for the colouring activity.

*You can make up a farm scene and use toy animals like the ones in the book.  

*You can cut out cardboard animals and hide them around the room

and have 'brown bear' (a teddy?) go on a search for his friends.

*You can work on colour mixing activities or scientific concepts.

*You can practice the different animal sounds as you meet them in the book.

*You can leave blanks in the story for the child to fill in with early words.  This is a great technique to encourage their 'reading' skills and participation with the book by interacting with the text to complete the missing words. 

Being a popular book, I imagine there are a number of other resources available online but these are the ones that come to my mind first. I hope you enjoy the book and use some of these strategies to use it as a tool to build literacy skills. Even more importantly I hope you use it to build moments of connection and interactions that are meaningful to you both!