Month 3, Week 2: All about the letter H.

It's our second week of November and we couldn't be more excited for this week's lesson plans, while we are still focusing on our giving thanks theme, we are also learning about brown bears and hibernation. This is one theme our preschooler has been really excited for since we just recently visited The Portland Zoo and saw the brown bears before they went into hibernation. To kick off the week we started with our letter of the week craft that you can see here. From there we really just dived into our brown bear theme of learning this week by making it an official "bring your teddy bear to school week".

We had transformed our school areas for the week into a teddy bear friendly zone with our very own cave to store our teddy bears for hibernation. This was just a fun dramatic play center we created with a pop up play tent and a few blankets. We left different materials for our toddlers to stuff and create their own unique cave experience inside. It could be anything you have lying around your house, in our case some little blankets, small pillows, and stuffing material. This pretend cave also provided us with a perfect little spot for reading our books of the week (you can see some of our favorites at the bottom of this post).

As you can see above our particular bear cave was literally packed with every teddy bear they could find and it really set the tone for our fun week. We wanted to include our teddy bears in every part of our day, especially with the learning so when I came across this free printable for using our teddy bears as tools of learning, I just knew I had to incorporate it. (you can see the printable in the picture below). This worksheet had a little bit of everything and it incorporated using legos to measure our teddy bear, which if you have a son you know how big of a hit legos can be.

 

From there we continued our number recognition learning with a fun and delicious twist of using teddy grahams as our counting tools. All you need are number flash cards/magnets/really anything you have around your homeschool area and a cup full of teddy grahams. This is just a fun and perfect independent activity for quiet time learning.

As I mentioned above we had a ton of favorite books covering all our learning about brown bears and hibernation, here were a few of our favorites:

To wrap up our fun week of learning we tied in a brown bear craft with our favorite book of the week "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Eric Carle, you can find the printable template for our craft here. All you need is this template, a paper bag, and some craft paper to create your own brown bear face. This is a fun way to tie in what you are reading with a hands on activity for your preschooler.

As we wrap up another week of learning, I just want to let all my viewers know that we are thankful for all of you! It completely humbles my heart knowing there are others out there alongside us on our journey of learning at home and we look forward to sharing next weeks learning themes as we wrap up on this month.