Eric Carle Books

Thought I would continue along with my preschool literacy bin description by reviewing the units I created for some popular Eric Carle books:  Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?, Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do You Hear?, From Head to Toe and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  These were some of my favorite books when my son was little and I continue to enjoy sharing these with my pre-k and kindergarten clients.

Make Learning Fun had sequence pictures ready to go for the bear books along with a suggestion to collect images weighted on a heavy object into a tin. Follow this link for your brown bear images and this link for polar bear pictures. While roaming through the dollar store and Hobby Lobby, I found the plastic bins with covers and half dollar coin holders pictured below.  The coin holders were a score because they have a plastic casing, so no need to laminate pictures.  Plus they were under $4 at Hobby Lobby for a pack of forty!  I plan on passing out the cards to clients while we read the story and then have each client take a turn dropping the picture in the bucket as each animal is named.  Once all the pictures are collected, I thought we could each shake the bucket while chanting, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?"  Then, give each student a turn to pull out a picture while saying, "I see a ..., looking at me!"   With the Polar Bear book, you can repeat the same carrier phrases, but mix it up a little and see if the clients can make the animal sound that the polar bear heard in the story as they retrieve the cards.   Also pictured below are my awesome Job Lot finds from a few years ago of an opposite card deck with images from the Polar Bear story and a rhyme card deck with Brown Bear images.

Opposite card deck purchased from Job Lot

Animal pictures sealed in coin case to make some
sound when dropped in the bucket!

From Head to Toe is a fabulous book for clients in Early Intervention and preschool.  It lends itself well to following simple commands with colorful visuals.  I like following this book with a game of Simon Says or play time with Mr. Potatoe Heads.  I also like using the monkey puppet pictured below to show children various movements.  Sometimes, it is easier for the child to show the movement by manipulating the puppet.  Recently, I found a simple puzzle on amazon that uses actual photos for body part images.  This pairs well with the theme of the book.  It is possible that all of these activities focusing on body parts could suffice for one Early Intervention session.

 
Again, Make Learning Fun had sequence pictures for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, so I printed, laminated, and hole punched these.  You can find several, awesome literacy activities for this book here. Make Learning Fun suggested attaching a green pipe cleaner to the caterpillar to help thread the insect through the foods.  I used this with my preschool clients and they LOVED it!  Before we read the story, I passed out the food pictures so we could work on comprehension.  Only wish the pictures were a little bigger for smaller hands!  Also included in my unit are sequence cards with story images on them, plastic beads, and a string, which are all from a kit scored at Job Lot years ago.  My four year old client diagnosed with Autism had so much fun using these cards and sequencing the beads.  He especially enjoyed talking about the colors, shapes, and creating his own patterns.  You could easily reproduce these sequence cards using boardmaker and/or yahoo images and most of us that work with young children have beads and a string laying around somewhere!  The colored pom poms pictured behind the sequence cards were another dollar store find.  I thought these could be used to create our own caterpillars or you could put magnets on the back and have clients work on matching skills by creating templates placed on cookie sheets. 

Pipe Cleaner Caterpillar sliding through a food.

Bead kit purchased from Job Lot 

Thank you, Eric Carle, for providing such great reads and beautiful artwork for our little ones!  Such classics!  If you need any of the above classics, then feel free to browse my affiliate links below: