Polar Bear

This small world activity came from the Habitats activity from our October Polar Bear Activity Box. As soon as we had finished sorting the animals into the habitats the girls were keen to play with their animals. And before I knew it they were retelling and rewriting the beautiful story Leaf by Sandra Dieckmann. Such a great activity for developing story language and language in general.

Set Up:

This activity was born from our habitats sorting activity and so didn’t actually require any set up as it was simply what was left over from that. The tissue paper, blue card, leaves, white play dough and wooden animals all come from our Polar Bear activity box.

We have read this story many times now and the girls are very familiar with it. After our habitats activity they had already started to use the animals as characters and now I said that I wanted to tell the story altogether using the animals. To start off with I definitely was leading the narration and the role play but before long they took over.

The language they used was amazing and we kept the book open not only to reference story details but also so I could magpie words from the story to weave into our play. The girls then also adopted the vocabulary and it became part of their play.

Once we had retold the whole story they started to ad lib and invent new parts of the story. We also began to think about what might happen next. Which is not always the easiest thing for children to do but with my prompting and suggestions they could then come up with their own imaginative suggestions.

After a while I left them to it and their play spilled over to other places in the room. Under a chair became a cave and the sofa a mountain to climb and leap off for Leaf.

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