Going On A Bear Hunt Preschool Activities

What Actually Happens When You Run This

Going on a Bear Hunt is a Michael Rosen book, and the preschool activities around it are basically an excuse to get children moving, listening, and saying the same silly phrases forty times. The structure is simple. A family decides to go on a bear hunt. They encounter obstacles. They make sounds for each one. They find the bear. They run home. That's it. Everything else is scaffolding you build around that skeleton. The real work is in the sensory and literacy layers you add. The book itself gives you a rhythm you can repeat across multiple sessions, which means you don't have to invent new content every week. You cycle through the same narrative with different materials, different movement challenges, and different language targets. That repetition is the whole point. Children this age need it, and frankly, so do you because it means less preparation time.

Going On A Bear Hunt Preschool Activities That Actually Work

Here's how I set it up when I'm running a group of twenty or so three- and four-year-olds. First week is the main event. I read the book once, fast, just so the kids hear the story. Then I read it again slowly, pausing at each obstacle. I hold up a prop for each one. A blue scarf for the river. A pile of crinkly paper for the tall grass. A colander or a curtain for the tunnel. A pile of cushions for the mud. A woolly sock or a puppet for the bear. We do the sounds together. Swishy swishy. Crash crash crash. Squelch squelch squelch. It gets loud. It always gets loud. The second week I set up obstacle courses in the classroom. Not elaborate ones. Just enough that they can physically move through the same elements from the story. A line of tape on the floor for the river. A sheet hung between two chairs for the tunnel. A tray of oat mess for the mud. The key is to let them attempt it independently while you narrate alongside them using the book's language. You're modeling the speech patterns, not directing every move. This usually takes about twenty minutes and then they want to do it again immediately. For literacy, I use the obstacle props as picture cards. The child picks one and says the sound word before moving through it. That's a language target disguised as play. For number recognition, I hide counting bears along the course and ask them to collect a certain number before reaching the bear's cave. For colour sorting, the mud becomes a bin of coloured pom poms and they sort by shade while squishing through it. Same activity framework, different learning goal.

One thing most people miss is the importance of the running home part. That's where the transition out of the activity lives. If you skip it, the kids come down from high arousal state too abruptly and the next activity collapses. I keep it as a designated running sequence. Everyone marches back to their mats, sits down, and does three slow breaths while I say the final line. It takes forty seconds and it saves the rest of the afternoon. I ran into a problem last autumn that I didn't see coming. A child who was non-speaking and had sensory processing differences became distressed by the oat mud. Not annoyed. Distressed. Full shutdown. The activity had been working well for everyone else, so I almost just moved on. Instead I stopped and created a parallel version. I kept the mud tray but added a second tray with dry pasta and dried beans at a different table. She could engage with the texture without the mess factor. She participated for ten minutes that session. The lesson was obvious in hindsight but easy to overlook when you're managing a full room: the framework matters more than the specific materials, and you should always have a texture-alternate ready for sensory-sensitive children. The math angle is worth addressing separately because it's where this activity gets strongest. You're dealing with ordinal concepts naturally. First the grass, then the river, then the mud, then the tunnel, then the forest, then the bear. That's a built-in sequencing and ordering lesson. I use magnetic numbers on the wall and have children place them in order as we encounter each stage. For older preschoolers, I add a simple prediction element. What comes after the river? I don't cue them with the book. They have to retrieve the sequence from memory. This tends to falter around session three when they start guessing rather than recalling, so I switch to having them physically arrange picture cards themselves instead. The tactile component anchors the memory better than verbal prompting alone.

Art extensions exist but they're secondary. The bear masks and printed pages you see everywhere online are fine as fillers. The ones that actually reinforce the learning are the texture books. Children glue or staple real fabric samples onto cardstock to match each obstacle. Silk for the river. Sandpaper for the forest floor. Cotton wool for the snow. This takes two sessions to complete properly and the result is something they can reference during future retellings. Worth the time investment if you're running this unit over a month rather than cramming it into a single day. Downsides are real and I'll list them plainly. The activity demands physical space that many preschools simply don't have. If your classroom is under three hundred square feet with permanent furniture, you're not setting up a mud pit and a tunnel. You'll manage with floor tape and cushions but the experience degrades noticeably. Second, the noise level is genuinely high. I've had neighboring teachers complain and I've had staff members request ear protection. It's not a subtle activity. Third, the repetition ceiling hits hard around session five. Children at this age will perform the sounds and movements mechanically unless you vary the learning target each time. If you don't plan variations in advance, the fifth run-through feels like punishment for everyone. A common pitfall is treating this as a one-day event. I see it constantly. Read the book, do the crafts, watch the video, call it done. That's not how preschool activities function. The value is in the repeated engagement across multiple days with escalating complexity. Week one is immersion and participation. Week two adds physical obstacles. Week three introduces literacy and numeracy layers. Week four is independent retelling where children direct the action for someone else. If you compress this into a single session you're left with a chaotic twenty minutes and no lasting developmental benefit.

For download links and printable resources, the Teaching Resources website and Early Years Foundation Stage databases have full obstacle card sets, sequencing mats, and phonics worksheets built around this story. Nothing I can link directly here but searching those sites for Bear Hunt produces usable material within minutes. The free stuff is adequate. The paid resources from Twinkl and similar platforms save you formatting time if you're producing large quantities. I'll leave it there. The core idea is straightforward. The execution requires planning and space, and it won't work in every classroom setup. But when the conditions are right it's one of the highest-return activities you can run with a preschool group. It hits motor skills, language, sequencing, listening, social participation, and emotional regulation all in a single framework. That's not common.