Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? The Importance of Reading

Why is reading so important?

Experiencing and engaging in language-rich interactions helps children develop communication skills, patience, empathy, and literacy—all of which are critical to success in school and beyond.

Reading and language skills begin to develop right from the start. Research has identified five early reading skills that are essential to learning:

1. Phonemic awareness — being able to hear, identify, and play with individual sounds in spoken words
2. Phonics — being able to connect the letters of written language with the sounds of spoken language
3. Vocabulary — the words children need to know to communicate effectively
4. Reading Comprehension — being able to understand and get meaning from what has been read
5. Fluency — being able to read text accurately and quickly

Our winter literacy month features the book Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?

Books are such a great addition to therapy sessions! Take a look at the many skills we like to incorporate when reading with our clients. We use a dialogic reading approach that

This activity works on sequencing the different animals that Brown Bear sees by using a visual. We also incorporated the felt animals so the children can feel and hold each animal as we talk through them. Lastly, we have a fun gross motor activity that gets the kids moving and grooving. The kids get to roll the dice and then “walk” like that animal to incorporate whole body movements and increase their overall understanding of each animal.

Other things you can work on with this activity:

1. Handwriting: after reading about each animal, have the children write that animal out
2. WH-questions: ask a question about each animal after you read about it. Some examples include “where do frogs live,” “what do ducks eat?” “what color are elephants?”.
3. Generating stories: Have the child create their own story about what they would see.
4. Describing: Work on describing each animal as you read about them.
5. Turn-Taking: Each child gets a turn reading the book or sequencing the animals.
6. Sequencing: Use the story board to sequence each animal Brown Bear saw.
7. Gross Motor Skills: crawl like a bear, hop like a frog, swim like a fish

Take a look at our video! One of our speech therapists goes through the different activities you can target while reading Brown Bear!

YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/us2TIpQP7gM