Children’s Hour: Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? (revisited)

Children’s Hour is a feature posted every Thursday here at Lucybird’s Book Blog. Children’s Hour is my time for reviewing children’s picture books. In my job in a nursery I encounter lots of children’s books, and these are the books I use for Children’s Hour.

You can find links to past Children’s Hour posts here.

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 couldn’t think what to write about for this week’s Children’s Hour. No new books, and there doesn’t seem to be a particular interest in old books which I haven’t already written about. I had been talking about how ‘my’ children continued to get on with Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Can You Hear? at home so Mum suggested that I revisit it. So that’s what I’ve decided to do. This almost feels like an early years blog. (You should read my Mum’s Blog by the way. It’s very good, and I don’t just say that because she’s my Mum).

First off here is my original Polar Bear post.

One of the more negative things I had said is that the kids don’t really know what the animals are. However they are learning this, some children better than others. They can name flamingo, walrus and leopard now (even as separate from lion, which is a frequent confusion when it comes to big cats). Whether they could do this out of context I’m not so sure. They do still call the boa constrictor a snake, which is right but is a similar thing to knowing the difference between a leopard and a lion. They have some problems with peacock too, but they are getting there. Initially they could get it from me saying “pea” but now they get it from the ‘p’ sound, and that’s good for other types of learning too. The zoo keeper only one child calls a zoo keeper rather than just a man, and Polar Bear is his favourite book, he always asks for it.

We’ve looked at the sounds of the animals too. We looked for them on youtube, and the kids liked trying to copy some of the sounds. They didn’t remember much, and it was something which required a little too much concentration to keep repeating. It has made it more popular for them to make the sounds of the animals, however.

The child who adores Brown Bear has been introduced to Polar Bear too now. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. He was so confused, bless him. He would look at the page I was reading, look a bit puzzled, then go and look at the cover, then the page again. He wasn’t very impressed. Maybe it just wasn’t as good as Brown Bear. Or maybe he feels about it the same way as I feel about the Harry Potter films.

Buy it:

I’m not doing buying links this week, you can look at the original post, or the picture links to amazon.