Teacher Tuesday: kindergarten lesson for "Going On A Bear Hunt"

I love using books and stories in my music lessons, especially with the younger students! Today I'll be sharing my favorite activities to use with the book, "We're Going On a Bear Hunt" by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury.

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First of all, this book is just the best. I have never met a child who doesn't like this story. You can get the book here:

The first thing I do when I use this book with kindergarten is read the story to them out loud. Before I start, I tell them to listen for "sound words". I read the story with a steady beat, and show the steady beat with my arms (swinging back and forth like I'm marching) which I say the words. I don't explicitly tell them to, but the students usually start keeping the beat along with me while they listen.

Afterwards, we talk about the "sound words" in the story- wonderful words like "swishy swashy" and "squelch squerch". Then I ask for volunteers to try making the sound with their own voices. I read the story again, but this time I ask all of the students to march on the beat during the refrain ("we're going on a bear hunt...") and make the sound with their voice when I get to the sound words. They love this! I love it too because besides being silly, it helps reinforce the concept of voice timbres, found / nature sounds, and steady beat.

Next we review the steps in the journey that they heard in the story. By now they have heard it twice, so they can usually remember the different parts of the excursion, like going through the grass and into the cave. Then I introduce our own bear hunt through the classroom! I use this activity to assess and practice their ability to follow a set of directions, their gross motor skills, and their understanding of directional vocabulary. I just use whatever I have laying around the room- this past year we had the following steps:

There's nothing fancy about it at all, but the children react as if it were a real adventure- they get so excited to take their turn! I demonstrate it once for them, emphasizing the direction words (over, through, etc), then have them go through all of the steps one at a time. Last year I had quite a few students that struggled with directions, so this was really good practice for them! Remembering 4 things in sequence like this is not as easy as it may seem for this age.

After our adventure through the classroom, we went over to the projector and copied the motions while we watched the video of Michael Rosen, the author, reciting the story. If you've never seen this video, you have to watch it- it is absolutely mesmerizing!

You can use these activities over a period or several lesson, use all or some of them in one lesson, or incorporate various parts into other lessons and revisit the story. I've done it all different ways and had great success with each. The activity where students listen for sound words and use their voice to make those sounds is a great lead-in to a deeper study on timbres in general. I recently posted some ideas for using another book about a bear, "The Bear Snores On", in this post, which is a great way to study timbres.

I'm linking up with Jennifer Bailey at Sing To Kids to share some of my favorite lessons to use with children's literature. Head on over to the link to see tons of other amazing ideas from other music teacher bloggers!

Have you ever used this book in your music classes? I would love to hear any other ideas you might have to go with this book! Leave a comment :)