We’re Going on a Bear Hunt: Poster Board Play Course

Book Title: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

Author: Michael Rosen
Illustrator: Helen Oxenbury
Type of book: Picture storybook
Book age range: Birth to preschool
Activity age range: Sixteen months and up

Why we like it: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, written by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, is one of our all-time favorite books. This picture storybook during which a family of five embarks on a vividly described imaginary bear hunt also has elements of a pattern book. With each encountered obstacle, the reader discovers, “We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh, no! We’ve got to go through it!” (1989). Because of these patterns, Bear Hunt is a fantastic book to read aloud, and Oxenbury’s illustrations beautifully depict the adventures of the father, mother, son, daughter, baby and family dog as they slog through land and water and brave the winter weather on their quest to find a bear.

On a personal note, this was the first “long” book Patton would listen to all the way through beginning at around 16 months, and I read shortened versions of the story to him before that. In fact, I feel like this book is one of the reasons his first word was “uh-oh!” at nine months old. Overall, it's just a lot of fun to read, see, and hear.

The poster board play course we use with this book is a lot of fun, and the best part about this activity is that it can be used over and over again, with and without the book. There are a few different ways to approach this activity, which basically consists of using poster board and a couple of other materials to recreate simple versions of the obstacles encountered by the family during the bear hunt: grass, mud, water, trees, snow, a cave, and their own front door.

Depending on the age of your child, you might want to work together to create the different pieces one at a time over several readings of the book. However, if your child is not that interested in paper crafting or if he or she is too young to use beginner’s paper-cutting scissors, you might just want to create these simple pieces the night before you read the book and have your child help you set them out. Then you can focus the activity on acting out the book as you read it.

Constructing the Play Course
You will need:

• Several pieces of poster board in various colors to represent grass, trees, mud, snow, water, a cave, and a door (I used two shades of green, two shades of blue, black, white, two pieces of brown, and yellow)

• Scissors

• Glue (regular school glue or a good quality glue stick will do)

• Optional: Paper doilies

Step 1: Create grass by cutting 4-6 inch slits along the two longest sides of the poster. The slits should be parallel with the short sides of the board. Once you are finished cutting, bend the cut pieces up so that they stand at a 90ish degree angle to create standing grass on each side. This way, your toddler can go “through” the grass using the middle of the board.

Step 2: Create a river by cutting a scalloped or wavy edge along the two longest sides of the blue poster board.

Step 3: Cut a puddle shape out of the brown poster board to create a nice big mud puddle. Try to keep the puddle as large as possible so your toddler can jump “into” it.
Step 4: To create a forest, cut several large brown strips from the remaining piece of brown poster board. Mine vary from 3 – 6 inches in width, and I cut them the length of the short side of the board to keep it simple. Next, create treetops by cutting scalloped edges along the remaining green piece of poster board. Stagger 4 – 5 brown strips below the treetops and glue them to the underside of the green board to create trees.

Step 5: The snowstorm poster board can be as simple or as complex as you would like to make it. You could use a plain piece of white poster board and nothing more; you could cut circles from a white poster board and paste them to a blue poster board; or, if you are like me and have an unreasonable amount of medium-sized paper doilies, you can glue doilies to a blue or white poster board to represent snowflakes. My little guy loves to use a glue stick, so this one is fun for us to do together.

Step 6: Create a cave by cutting two corners off the black poster board to create a somewhat dome-like shape.

Step 7: Use whatever color poster board you wish to represent the front door. The door in the book is green, but you might want to use the same color as your own front door or your child’s favorite color instead. I used yellow. If you wish, you can cut four rectangles from leftover white poster board and a brown circle from leftover brown poster board to embellish the door with windows and a knob.

Step 8: Lay out the pieces you’ve created in the order in which they appear in the book, with the front door first (so your child can run back through the other obstacles to get home, just as the family in the book). You might wish to skip this step and introduce each piece to your child as you read the book, setting out the different pieces as you reach the corresponding part of the story.

Step 9: Have fun! Help your child act out the book using the poster board play course. You might want to read the book once and then act it out, or your child might want to go through each part of the course alongside the family in the book.

I hope you enjoy this set of simple props, and I hope it helps bring this fabulous book to life for your child.

References
Rosen, M. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. New York: Little Simon, 1989.