Benefits of our visiting the bears provocation
Learning and discovery for ALL children as they develop their social and emotional skills, enhance language and vocabulary, and develop fundamental movement skills through creative active role-play to music, and sensory experiences.
Included
A super simple guide on how to set the scene for your little one’s experience searching for bears in the woods. Choosing weather-appropriate clothing, what to pack, and what woodland animals we could encounter on our adventure.
The interactive story, illustrations (to carry the story forward), movement guide, music, speech and language activities (including a story chain train), and sensory experiences.
And… a certificate, created for us by our SALT, to help develop narrative skills to share with their families at home.
How we did it
Setting the scene: Working on children’s next steps.
We put wooden items on the floor when we went on the journey, so we could use prepositions to go over, around, and between.
Then we had to clean up the fairy tale world (the forest) and pick up the blocks according to the description called out. After all that tidying, we made it to the path. But we had to make sure we took the right path. Marion used pictures of bunnies and other woodland animals, and we had different maths challenges using them to find the right path.
When we reached the end of the path, we expected a cottage, but it wasn’t there! We used blocks to make a cottage together and described the shapes as it grew.
We had to do a secret knock to wake the bears, but no one came to the door. We all talked about ‘Clever Never Goes’ (New Stranger danger) and whether it would be safe to enter the cottage.
We decided no, but we could hear crying. Fortunately, mother bear came to the door. She was crying as her baby bear was missing. We made her tea to help her calm down. Lots of pouring practice and we tried tea. Only one little one liked it 😊.
Then we noticed all the shoes and decided to help tidy up. We had to decide together whose shoes were whose. We couldn’t use colour we had to use size. A good discussion was had about how boys can have pink shoes and girls can have blue.
After we got them sorted, we found baby bear footprints that led us outside. We followed them to rainbow puddles. We had to cross by jumping through the puddles. Marion put numbers on the puddles and called out numbers, and we jumped to that one. Some of us used colour instead of numbers depending on our abilities.
Baby bear also crossed a high beam (tree trunk across a river) on his journey – on days when we were inside, we used a low beam for this part of the adventure. We chose if we wanted to hold hands or have a go ourselves and we crossed the beam.
Then we found baby bear trapped inside a log! We problem-solved lots of ways to get him out. We tried rolling the log, turning it on its side until finally, we made a long pole and pushed him out.
We developed this adventure over many days and everyone had a great time.
Thank you, Marion and Graeme, and all your little ones at Soar Childcare for sharing your adventure on the Littlemagictrain.
