A "Beary" Good First Week! Lots of Freebies!

My first week starts Wednesday!This year my teammate and I decided to change up the start of our year. We always usually start with insects because it goes with our Bridges math program but since our Kinder spent so much time on insects we're going with bears instead. I'm excited! It's going to be so fun!
We have a 3 day week to start so we felt they should have a fun first few days! I wanted to share some of what we will be doing and give some freebies too! I might put them into a unit on TPT soon so grab them for free while you can.

First we are going to play "Mystery Bag" with the students. This is a game where the kids take turns asking yes or no questions and try to figure out what is in the bag. A teddy bear will be hiding and ready to engage them in the unit. Then we will read "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" and actually go on a "bear hunt" around the school to show students the basic locations ( office, restrooms, nurse, cafeteria etc). We made our signs using a printed blank bear outline, copied the outline on brown construction, labeled the locations and hung around the school. Easy Peezy!

Then, we will be playing 4 corners with bears. The students will have to decide which bear ( Panda, Polar, Brown or Black) they like the best and discuss the reason for their choice with a partner. The student will then write why they like that type of bear. We will use the sentence frame I like ____________ because.
We are going to graph these results as well during math.

Over the next two days we will be completing
many more bear related math activities. Here a few below:

I will be playing a one more/ one less bear hunt with numbers to 20. Each student will get a bear number card. I will call out clues like one more than 6 or 1 less than 11. The student(s) with the number card will stand up.

After the whole group practice, I will assess this skill with this one more/ one less bear worksheet.

We will also be estimating how many bear counters in a jar, brainstorming strategies for counting and then counting them as a class.

                                We will of course be using gummy bears to count and sort...

                        
              ... and teddy grahams to make combinations of 5.

 On Friday, we are letting the students bring their Teddy Bear from home so we can describe our bear with our partners and then use them for math! We will be working in partners to measure our bears with unifix cubes. After measuring, we will come together as a group and order our bears from shortest to tallest using our unifix cube measuring towers. We will then think of ways to sort our bears!


        To end the week, we will complete my "Beary" Good Week Writing Craftivity.

 These are only a few of the activities; there are actually more! I will post pictures of the other activities after this week. If you want any of these printables, just click a picture to get all the freebies in one file. I hope this post gave you some ideas and saved you some work if you are going to start with bears. Please leave me a comment if you download anything! I'd love to hear any ideas you have about bears!

I am also having a 20% off sale to celebrate going back to school. My most expensive items are now an even better deal!