Brown Bear Showing Progress Activity

With Parent-Teacher Conferences just around the corner, here's a neat little activity I created to demonstrate student progress.  

At the beginning of the year, we did a "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" unit.  We started making a Brown Bear book from MakingLearningFun.com.  Instead of doing the book every day until it was complete, we colored one page each week.  This timeline allows us to focus on the student's progress regarding attending to task and coloring in the lines.  

Each week we model how to color the page and then prompt “fill in the space”.  This is a prompt our Occupational Therapist suggested and it really works well. It trains the children to be aware and look at their paper as they color.  My paras and I write a comment on the back of each coloring page describing how the child colored that day. For example, “Joe resisted coloring. He needed hand-over-hand support” or “Susie found the color she needed and colored the page independently.”   

This is the colored image completed during Week 5.

This week the children are finishing up their books.  WOW... have we seen progress!  Each child is at their own level. Some students have learned to sit at the table and color for the duration of the activity. Others have made significant progress in "filling in the space".  See one child’s progress below.

The three pages above demonstrate the student's progress from Week 1 - Week 3.

The three pages above demonstrate the student's progress from Week 3 - Week 5.

Each child’s book will be put together and stapled to give to his/her parent at conferences. 

Assembled booklet given to student's parent during Parent-Teacher Conferences.

This activity is a great way to start a conversation with parents about student progress and needs. It also serves as a take-home activity for children to review basic colors and practice early literacy concepts like reading color words and tracking from left to right.