Children’s Hour is a feature here at Lucybird’s Book Blog on Thursdays where I look at children’s picture books. As I work in a nursery I get plenty of opportunities to look at picture books, and to see what the kids think of them so it really makes sense to use those experiences.
I’d love to hear everybody’s experiences of the books I review too, and feel free to post me a link to your own reviews, I’d love to make this a bit interactive.
The image (if you were wondering) is taken from Shirley’s Hughes’ Alfie and Annie-Rose books which I loved as a child.
I currently work with the pre-schoolers (aged 3-4) so most of my readings are to them.
This week I am not talking about a book as such, but about an afternoon we had based around our favorite book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.
One of our parents had suggested a story hour as a workshop idea as her kid loves stories, but most of our kids couldn’t sit and listen to stories for that long! So I decided to do a story based workshop instead, based around Bear Hunt.
We started off reading the story together, and it was really nice to have the children and the parents joining in. Then we had a talk about how the bear felt (sad, because he wanted to be friends) before doing some bear hunt related activities. (unfortunately child protection means I can’t put any photos).
We had planting seeds, for the grass. This was popular but most of the kids were more interested in just chucking all the dirt in the pots, and one of the kids put soil in the water, which meant we then couldn’t use the water for the river.
For the snow storm we had some coloured ice with things frozen in it. The girls especially seemed to like this one, one of the girls actually stayed doing it for a whole hour! This might have been because of the gems hidden in one of the ice pieces. The boys became more interested about it when they saw that there was a tiger in some of the ice!
For the forest we had painting with sticks, this didn’t seem that popular, which sort of surprised me, but one kid did lots of pictures and said he prefered painting with sticks over brushes.
The ‘mud’ was very popular, but also very messy! We had making muddy footprints with brown paint. Part of the mess issue with this is that the kids who didn’t have parents there were sort of taking over and it . was something that needed supervision.
Probably the most popular bit though was the cave and the bears. I put this in our forest school area, making a covered ‘cave’ area, hiding bears and leaving torches. The idea was for the kids to see how many bears that they could find, but to be honest they were more interested in just using the torches.
