Climb aboard the Littlemagictrain and let’s journey deep into the forest to visit our bear friends!
We arrive in the woods, but uh-oh — we’re a bit lost! Time to use our map and work together to find the way.
There it is — the bear’s cottage! Let’s knock on the door… but no answer.
What’s that noise? Could it be… snoring bears?
While we wait for them to wake up, we spot a huge pair of boots. Let’s try them on — stomp, stomp! Do you feel like a big growly bear now?
Look — some puddles! Baby Bear’s wellies are perfect for splashing. Time for some soggy, squishy fun!
Baby Bear wakes up and invites us to help with the chores. Team-work time! Can you help peg out the washing?
Oh no — a big gust of wind blows everything off the line! Quick! Catch that washing before it flies away!
After all that helping, it’s time for a delicious snack with Baby Bear. Yummy treats and bear giggles all around.
Now it’s time to say goodbye to our new friends and follow the forest path back home.
Hop aboard the Littlemagictrain, full of muddy boots and memories of a lovely day in the woods.
And don’t forget — all brilliant bear helpers get a special certificate to take home and share their woodland adventure!
How we did it
Setting the scene: Working on children’s next steps.
We put wooden items on the floor when we went on the journey, so we could use prepositions to go over, around, and between.
Then we had to clean up the fairy tale world (the forest) and pick up the blocks according to the description called out. After all that tidying, we made it to the path. But we had to make sure we took the right path. Marion used pictures of bunnies and other woodland animals, and we had different maths challenges using them to find the right path.
When we reached the end of the path, we expected a cottage, but it wasn’t there! We used blocks to make a cottage together and described the shapes as it grew.
We had to do a secret knock to wake the bears, but no one came to the door. We all talked about ‘Clever Never Goes’ (New Stranger danger) and whether it would be safe to enter the cottage.
We decided no, but we could hear crying. Fortunately, mother bear came to the door. She was crying as her baby bear was missing. We made her tea to help her calm down. Lots of pouring practice and we tried tea. Only one little one liked it 😊.
Then we noticed all the shoes and decided to help tidy up. We had to decide together whose shoes were whose. We couldn’t use colour we had to use size. A good discussion was had about how boys can have pink shoes and girls can have blue.
After we got them sorted, we found baby bear footprints that led us outside. We followed them to rainbow puddles. We had to cross by jumping through the puddles. Marion put numbers on the puddles and called out numbers, and we jumped to that one. Some of us used colour instead of numbers depending on our abilities.
Baby bear also crossed a high beam (tree trunk across a river) on his journey – on days when we were inside, we used a low beam for this part of the adventure. We chose if we wanted to hold hands or have a go ourselves and we crossed the beam.
Then we found baby bear trapped inside a log! We problem-solved lots of ways to get him out. We tried rolling the log, turning it on its side until finally, we made a long pole and pushed him out.
We developed this adventure over many days and everyone had a great time.
Thank you, Marion and Graeme, and all your little ones at Soar Childcare for sharing your adventure on the Littlemagictrain.
