Brown Bear Brown Bear First Week of School Activities

Today we are going to focus on activities for the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Most of your students will already know this book from preschool, so it will be a welcome and familiar sight!

Daily Schedule

8 am – Arrival and Morning Work – Review arrival procedures. Students work on scissor fine motor skills during morning work time. Pay close attention to those students that don’t have the correct scissor grip. Every time you pass out a paper that requires cutting you need to check in with these students to make sure they are practicing the correct grip.

If this is not fixed early, the incorrect grip will become permanent. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience, I cut like a lefty weirdo only using my thumb and index finger. My kindergarten teacher actually apologized to my mom that she didn’t catch it fast enough : )

8:30 am – Calendar and Class Rules – We practice our calendar routines and discuss rule #4, and color the corresponding coloring page.
9:00 am – Teach Routines – Working from my procedures list, I teach them what to do when there are visitors in the room or when the phone rings. How to wait for me patiently if we are at the rug, or how to continue to do their work in they are at their seat.
9:30 am – Assessment – Number formation assessment

A Note About Fine Motor Skills

Some students really struggle with their scissor skills and others breeze right through the activity. I don’t make them finish the worksheet if they are really struggling. Like I said before, the first week is all about informal assessment.

The same is true for all the work that I am presenting to you for the first week of school. The activities that I give you are not super challenging and are right in line with the skills we want our students to come in with from preschool.

These activities help you to weed out the kids who don’t have that very basic understanding of letters, numbers, or have a lack of fine motor skills. These children will need intervention early and often.

If you jump on small group work with these students starting the second week of school, you can quickly correct gaps that are missing, and catch them up to speed with the rest of the class.

Routines and Assessment

9:55 am – Routines – review any recess procedures that your students have been struggling with.
10 am – Recess
10:15 am – Routines – choose one from the list that still needs to be covered.
10:25 am – Language Arts – Read Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See and complete story sequencing activity.
10:50 am – Routines – choose one from the list that still needs to be covered.
11:00 am – Math – Brown Bear patterns.

Patterns are not technically included in the Common Core Standards, but they are an important skill. If all of your students have this mastered, then you can move on, and not worry about teaching that skill. Depending on the number of students who are missing the skill, you may need to revisit it either in whole class lessons or in small groups.

11:20 am – Art – Brown Bear art
11:40 am – Routines – End of the day procedures, cleanliness, and packing-up expectations.
11:50 am – Clean-up/Pack-up
12:00 pm – Dismissal