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 | Butcher paper or newsprint; cardboard; scissors; paint or markers; masking tape
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Bringing the Outside In
 | Bring the animals from Bears Make Rock Soup into your classroom! Using Lisa Fifield's painting as a model, you can easily make art that brings the book, and the animals inside it, to life. Designate a part of your room to decorate.
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| Photocopy and then enlarge one of the crows flying on the side of page 26 of Bears Make Rock Soup to fill an 8.5” by 11” piece of paper. Cut out the bird and paste the outline to a piece of cardboard, creating a stencil. Now make a line of flying crows by stenciling across a band of butcher paper. Put the paper high on the walls to have crows flying across your classroom. |
| Copy the outline of the bear on page 9 onto a large piece of butcher paper, using brown paint or markers. Cut the bear out and put it up, below the border of the birds. If you wish, repeat the same process with the deer on page 29.
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| Using pieces of cardboard or brown construction paper, recreate the moose tracks crossing page 17. Using masking tape, place the tracks on the floor so they lead up to your Bears Make Rock Soup area.
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The Changing Seasons
Through a discussion of seasonal changes in the natural environment, students begin to consider their own relationships to nature.
20 min.
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large group
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Much of Bears Make Rock Soup focuses on people's interactions with nature: their responses to the changing seasons and their relationships with the animals. Before reading the book with your students, get them thinking about their own responses to these themes. Begin by asking your classes what weather characterizes each season in your area.
Next, ask your class what they do in different seasons. How do they know that fall is coming? What makes winter special? What does spring mean to them? Why is summer important? Help students think not only about seasonal events, such as the holidays or summer vacation, but also about their responses to weather changes and the natural environment. Do they eat different foods? Do their outdoor activities change? How?
Guide students to consider that where they live may have an impact on their responses to the seasons. How do people respond in another part of the country or the world? What do they know about how people in the Plains and Woodlands adapt to the seasons?
Ask students to think about how animals adapt to the changing seasons. Prompt them for examples of seasonal events such as birds migrating, bears hibernating, or animal babies being born.
Diving In
30 min.
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whole class or small groups
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Introduce the book to students in a large or small group. The focus of this first reading should be reading for pleasure–encouraging students to enjoy the beauty of the book and the story it tells. In order to foster this enjoyment, try some of the following activities:
| Discuss the cover, the title, and the illustrations. Look at the structure of the book–how it is set up in two-page spreads made up of paintings and stories. Explain that each two-page spread tells a different story, but that all the stories are connected.
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| Encourage the class to explore the book by taking a “picture walk” through the book, thinking about the story as it is told in the illustrations. Tell students to pair up with a neighbor sitting next to them and discuss what they see in the illustrations as you turn the pages of the book in front of them. At the end of the picture walk, ask the students to share one thing that they observed in the illustrations.
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| Once they've shared their observations about the illustrations, ask students what they think the book is about. List these predictions and ask students to check them after the reading is complete.
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Animal Words
Students practice strategies for identifying and defining difficult words, using vocabulary related to the animals in the story.
30 min.
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whole class
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CA Reading Standard 1.6 and 1.7: Students use sentence and word context to find the meaning of unknown words. Students use a dictionary to learn the meaning and other features of unknown words.
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| Flipchart and markers or blackboard and colored chalk; dictionaries
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Explain to the class that they are going to find special words in the book. On a flipchart or the blackboard, make a table of three columns with the following headings: animals, what they do, and what they're like. Ask students if they know other names for these different kinds of words: nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Ask the class to help you fill the three columns with words they remember reading in the book. Then, have students look in the book for more words. If students do not know the meaning of a word, ask them which column they would guess it belongs to. Encourage students to use the context of the sentence to figure out what part of speech it is. Write unfamiliar words in a different color to mark them.
Using a new color, make lines connecting animals with their actions and adjectives. Refer to the book to make sure the connections are correct. Now return to the unknown words, and ask students if they can figure out what they mean, based on the stories in which they appear or the animals, actions, or descriptors with which they are paired.
If students cannot use context clues to deduce the meaning of the new words, have them refer to the dictionary for definitions. You can also have students use the dictionary to check the deductions they did make. Examples of some words students might find difficult are included below.
The Other Side of the Story
Students compare and contrast stories in the book and identify the key features of stories, deciding what makes the stories similar and different.
45 min.
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whole class or small groups
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CA Language Arts Standard 2.7: Students extract appropriate and significant information from the text.
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| flipchart and markers
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Explain to students that they are going to compare several stories in the book to see what's the same and what's different. Encourage them to listen carefully for similarities and differences as you read “Black Bear Sleeping in a Tree” and “Bears Make Rock Soup” out loud.
On the blackboard or flipchart, list the two stories' similarities and differences. Help students think not only about the stories' events, but also about the settings, characters, and language. For example, students might say that the main characters of “Black Bear Sleeping in a Tree” and “Bears Make Rock Soup” are bears and people. Encourage them to think about the fact that in the first story, the people help the bears, while in the second, the bears help the people. The first story takes place in the autumn, while the second takes place in winter. Ask students why those different settings matter.
Break the class up into several small groups and have each group repeat this exercise with different stories. Good pairs of stories include: “The Naming Ceremony” and “Last Respects”; “The Abandoned Yearling” and “Grandfather Moose”; and “Keepers of the Sky” and “Crows Cawed a Warning.” Give each group a piece of flipchart paper and markers so students can record their ideas.
When the groups have finished recording their comparisons, ask them to share what they found with the rest of the class. Ask students what similarities they see among all the stories in the book as a whole. Students might say, for example, that all the stories feature animals, or that in many of the stories, the characters face a problem and receive help from somebody else.
What Makes a Folktale?
Students reach an understanding of the elements of genre by comparing the stories in Bears Make Rock Soup to familiar fables and folktales.
30 min.
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large group
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CA Language Arts Standard 3.2: Students comprehend the basic plots of classic fairy tales, myths, folktales, legends, and fables from around the world
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| Blackboard and chalk
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Ask the class to name some fables and folktales they know that feature animals. Good examples of children's stories include Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Three Little Pigs, and familiar legends might feature Anansi the Spider or Coyote the Trickster. If students volunteer stories with which you or other members of the class are not familiar, ask for a (brief!) summary.
Lead a discussion with your class about what makes these stories fairy tales or folktales. What do all of these stories have in common? List these shared characteristics on the blackboard. Elements of the genre to mention include the following:
| These stories have no one specific author; they are handed down through oral tradition. |
| In these stories, animals have many human characteristics, such as the ability to think and talk. |
| These stories don't take place in a specific time or place; they come from an imagined past (this is often indicated by the phrase “Once Upon a Time”). |
| These stories often involve magic of some kind. |
| Characters in these stories sometimes represent good or evil–they're not just individual people with personalities. |
| These stories are usually short enough to be told aloud in one sitting. |
Now, ask your class whether they think the stories in Bears Make Rock Soup could be folktales. Do they share the elements of the genre? Why or why not? What do the plots and characters of Bears Make Rock Soup have in common with fables and folktales?
Other Reading Activities
| Draw students' attention to the sentences in large print on the side of each story. Each of these sentences summarizes the story's events and is a quotation that captures a key moment in the story. They serve a purpose similar to that of a topic sentence in nonfiction. Ask students to find other quotations in the stories that they think could serve the same purpose, or to write alternative summary statements.
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