three bears smoosh painting

Every year when we read The Three Bears, we pull out the honey bears for some painting fun. This year, I added a slight twist to the usual suspects...

The children selected a square of construction paper in either red, white, blue, or yellow. They would then place their paper into the cookie sheet and get ready to engage those squeeze muscles. It isn't easy to squeeze paint out of a honey bear!

The children added paint to their heart's content then placed a sheet of plastic wrap on top of the happy mess. Once the plastic was placed, it was time to smoosh away.

Their favorite part was the magic of not getting their hands covered in paint (and this is a class that LOVES to cover their hands in paint!)

Minds may have been blown!

I wish I had thought to take photos of the final art...I may have but I cannot find them...we also taped up some of the pieces of plastic into our windows...all sorts of colorful pretty!

Enjoy!

three bears play dough play

 I made a batch of cinnamon scented play dough  and added a few bear accessories added for fun. I picked up the bears from etsy seller Clickity Clack and highly recommend them.

 

 

 

 

I added some oats as well as rolling pins, muffin pans, cookie cutters and measuring cups. The children really enjoyed baking porridge cookies and pie.

three bears baking

For our week of The Three Bears we created a porridge muffin recipe using our cupcake baker. For ingredients I set out all of the usual suspects along with three measuring spoons and three measuring cups.

 

We bake a lot in class so the children know that we use flour, sugar, oil, eggs, and sometimes milk. I held up the measuring cups/spoons and named them...Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear. We began with flour and the children got to decide how many cups and which cup at that, of flour we needed.

 

After flour, we added oats, then sugar, eggs, backing soda, baking powder, and a dash of cinnamon for good measure. The children really favored the Baby Bear measure and I decided to pose question about quantity once we had mixed everything up "Do you think this is enough batter for everyone to enjoy a muffin?" After a few rounds of negotiation, the children decided to add more oats and just a little more flour.

 

We mixed and mixed and added one heaping cookie scoop to each cupcake well, closed the lid and plugged in the baker. The children know that the baker is off limits once the lid is closed and went about playing in the classroom until it was snack time.

 

 

The children were so proud! The muffins were super dense and surprisingly NOT sweet and they ate every last crumb.

paint with bear bottles

 We kind of had a field day with books of threes. We began with The Three Little Kittens, then moved on to The Three Billy Goats Gruff and ended our adventure with The Three Bears. For our week of The Three Bears we explored oats, size and mass, and of course...bears! My favorite was painting with bear bottles, really it was less about painting with the bottles and more about the presentation. 

Rather than remove the entire seal from each bottle, I punched a hole or two in the seal with a toothpick. This kept the paint from being squeezed out completely on the first try and made the children work a little hard for their results (though the bottles are super sturdy and not exactly the easiest to squeeze). Setting out primary colors only had the children working from memory to mix up the colors they wanted. I had thought originally they would mix the paint onto the paper plates but they, of course, had other ideas.

There was a request for glitter and other bits of pizazz. I never refuse glitter or pizazz.  They found that their plates, when painted, looked like planets while the paper underneath was outer space.

We will be revisiting this again as more talk of planets came up recently. I need to get some books and maybe I will read this one again, it's a rest time favorite.

 

 They each spent a longer than usual amount of time on their creations often going back to the window where we place our artwork to dry to bring their art back to the table for a little bit more paint of pizazz. The large bits of foil pizazz is a bit like this while the bear bottles came from here.