I decided to make a lessen for the day on Hibernation. The day went so well with all my daycare kids. I was able to spread out the different activies throughout the day, making it a all day learning experience.
We started our morning off with making a list of animals we knew hibernated. The Bear or course was the most popular. Turning their pretend play into them all being little bear cubs 🐻. So we built a giant blanket fort, aka bear cave.
We cuddled around inside the fort for story time. I got together a few books that went along with our imaginations. I choose these three.
Brown Bear, Bear Brown, What Do You See? Is a wonderful book allowing toddlers to read themselves. They are able to practice their colors along with creating a great self esteem because they are actually reading! Wake Me In The Spring is a oldie but a goodie, it’s a story about s bear and a mouse friendship. Mouse not wanting bear to hibernation and miss all the winter fun. And Hungry Harry I choose because we learned that frogs hibernate, so discussing and reading about hungry Harry trying to find his dinner leads to good disussions about how hungry the animals are when they awake from their slumber.
After a good nap they were ready to build their own bear caves. I collected some materials laying around readily available.
- Sticks
- Top of a pizza box cut in half
- Leaves
- Play dough
- Toothpicks
- Brown paper bags
- Water & baking soda mixer
- Glue sticks
We taped our bags to the cardboard. I allowed the kids to put glue wherever they wanted to glue down the leaves and sticks. We rolled three play dough balls. And placed them on a toothpick creating a pretend bear for the inside of the caves. The kids had a blast discussing the different sizes for the head, body, and tail. To finish it off they pour and painted baking soda and water mixer all over their creations. Making the effect of iced and snow.
Here’s our finally creations.
Hibernation Day was a wonderful day for all of us. Enjoy running with your little ones creative imaginations with this project.
Freakouts & Funnies 