My Brown Bear version is the board book version that includes the sliding cards. I think it's the best because the clinician can block the student from sliding the card, until they say the phrase! It's a awesome reinforcer, because they love to see what animal is next! At circle time, when I read the book I focus on attributes and categories for the animals. We sort animals into things that have wings, number of legs, size, shape, etc.
The main activity that I use in therapy is a Brown Bear retelling necklace. Just grab some beads and string and the printable story characters. It's great for following directions and color words while you are making each animals piece. I gave the students directions as I added they created the necklace (ex: add the bear and one yellow bead.) For students with just emerging verbalizations, we used this activity while we imitated each animal sound.
My kids loved making these! After we made the necklace, we could easily retell the story using the necklace!
This was a simple picture to picture matching sheet. You can use it to work on receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, requesting, sign, following directions, etc!
I also used these size sequencing bears. They work great for both spatial concepts and positional concepts. Lots of my friends need to work on following directions, and the bears are great for that! Another activity I have used is the half matching pictures. It's a great skill for those younger kids!
This a story retelling strip I use when we aren't making a story telling necklace! I printed sentence strips to support those kids who need it!
This is an eye spy activity! You add rice and the pictures of each animal into the water bottle. Then students can work on finding each animal and marking it off on their sheet. This really gets them talking!
Another item we used is the Brown Bear sign language reader! We did it and then sent a copy home to the family! You can grab the Sign Language Book HERE. (By the way - one of the colors is wrong, but still a great resource! I just write a note on it!).
I also used the Ipad this week! I saved the pictures to my ipad and then added them into the Image Spinner App. In a group a students we took turns spinning and trying to get all the animals! We marked them off on the I Spy sheet above.
You can download most of the activities listed above at a wonderful website called MakeLearningFun. This is the link for the Brown Bear Printables.
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