this week we took the opportunity to make brown painted handprints from our bear hunt prep, drew with different shades of blue, and recorded our findings from feeling balloons filled with different things…

and our golden letter friends got a sparkly letter Bs on their journals:

this “dangerous” spot remains a favorite place to practice balancing.

well, we worked on this “bear hunt” plan all week. an unplanned part of the week was hunting for our book, we’re going on a bear hunt.we never found it but mr matt had the clever idea of looking on line. sure enough, the same book in animated version! click here to watch it. there is some spooky music sometimes, so you should know that.we made beautiful brown paint, painted enough paper plates for everyone, let them dry for a day, cut out eye holes, glued on ears and noses, made several graphs…and then finally we were ready to go on our own bear hunts. everyone chose to be a bear or a person or to watch. we did it as often as we could before it was going-home time. here is the cave:
the family of people:
the people approaching the cave:
the chase:we recommend that you “go on a bear hunt as long as you are pretending and not teasing real bears and as long as you remember that when the bears get to your house they don’t want to eat you, they want to eat berries and oatmeal so give it to them.”

i understand the automatic response to seeing a child draw with markers and smash cars on play dough.

it makes sense to me that a teacher may suggest using the markers on paper, the cars on the rug and other tools with the play dough. but the children who did this in my classroom last week were so constructive and focused, brand new to our classroom, using items that were stored only a few feet apart…so i let it happen. when other children questioned it, i explained that this play dough and markers could go together and that other times we would have play dough and markers that won’t go together. i explained that it works to use the cars in the play dough today and other days they will be other places.

there is a fine squiggly and often changing line between order and rules and respecting property and free expression and the blissful innocence.

and i want them to get it all.