Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

"Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do you See?" written by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle is one of the book speech therapists use during early start sessions. 

 This book is useful to teach younger children. It focuses on one color concept and animal per page; the kids will only focus on the object when we're pointing at it, with no distraction on other supporting things on the same page. 

Here's how you can do the activities with your child at home:

1). Find pictures of the book's animals to make visual aid (like matching pictures activities); brown bear, red bird, yellow duck, blue horse, green frog, purple cat, white dog, black sheep, goldfish, and teacher/children (optional). Or you can make a copy from the book and resize the animal pictures smaller. Laminate them and put soft Velcro on the back of each so the images will stay in the book and the hard Velcro on the book. A board book format is always a better choice for repeated use and durability when working with younger children.

2). When you read the book, point to the animal in the book. For example, when you read the first page, "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?" Lightly tap to the bear in the book and try to make your child point to the bear too. Make your child participate and repeat the words brown bear and let him/her find the bear picture and attach it to the book. This way will make your child attend more to the page. Participation in the book reading makes your child recognize animal or color concepts. 

3). Turn the page to say the next animal, "I see a red bird looking at me. Your child needs to see the picture and associate it with the words you say. Repeat the color and animal words as your child point to the animal in the book. Other strategies that you can use instead of reading the sentence make it like a rap song. Repetition and simple language are critical to your child. 

You can modify the teaching and goals in different sessions by naming the picture and asking the animal's sound made. This strategy might works also with a limited verbal communication child. For example, on the page to the horse picture, ask how the horse sound. The child might say, "neigh, neigh," or even if he/she says it wrong, it's an opportunity for us to engage. She can then select the horse picture from a visual field and attach it to the book.

You use the same strategies with any other two books of Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle;" Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?" and" Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?"

The Polar Bear book helps the children learn some features of zoo animals. You can also distinguish descriptive concepts for each animal, such as the zebra, a horse with "stripes" or "black and white stripes"—lots of ways to model descriptive concepts while reading this book. The elephant is "big," or the flamingo has "long legs," leopard has" dark spots" on its fur.