Going on a Bear Hunt: Making Maps

I've been doing the "Going on a Bear Hunt" chant with the girls (3 years old) since they were tiny babies, and it's still a favorite.  Even Baby H enjoys doing it with us.  If you don't know what I'm taking about, watch the dramatic reading of Going on a Bear Hunt by it's author, Michael Rosen, on YouTube.  I'm trying to reinforce what we've been learning about maps with the kids before we go on a road trip later this week, so I created a map for us to follow on our bear hunt.  Then L and E drew their own maps of our journey...

The girls did an amazing job on their maps (E's is the top picture, and L's is the lower one).  I guided them through the process with verbal assistance ("Where did we go after crossing the wavy grass?"), as well as letting them connect-the-dots to make the path.  It was really interesting because initially E didn't want to make a map and scribbled over her paper instead, but after she saw what L was doing, she begged me to help her make a map too.  They were both very proud of their maps, and we used them to go on another bear hunt.

Then we watched some YouTube videos of bears playing, catching salmon, and hibernating.  We pretended to be bears all morning, eating berries and then going into our cave (under the dining room table) to hibernate.  I read the kids some more bear-themed stories:

E asked to do a maze, so I drew a maze for her to find the bear's cave:

L asked to write the word "bear" for her magic word box (I'll post more about that later):

Both girls agreed that preschool was a lot of fun this morning.  I'll have to start doing more activities around a single theme because the kids seem to really get into it (they enjoyed our frog-theme last week).