Caitie is sharing tips for using the preschool song “The Bear Went Over The Mountain” in the classroom and at home for lots of fun learning with little ones. She has lots of great ideas! And she’ll lead us through the song using gestures – an excellent way to introduce a song to children. “The Bear Went Over The Mountain” is a classic nursery rhyme and in our version, we expanded on the original to include the prepositions over, across, through, and up, while the bear explores different parts of the wilderness.
Try these ideas in the classroom or at home!
- This is a great song to introduce preposition vocabulary. Before you sing the song, introduce the words over, across, through, and up by speaking the word and demonstrating the gesture.
- Try using a toy teddy bear as a prop to help demonstrate the different prepositions in the song. You can have the bear interact with items in the classroom to bring the words to life. For example, the bear went over the desk. The bear went up the book shelf.
- Try making a picture of a map that includes the different parts of the outdoors the bear explores in the song: the mountain, the river, the forest and the big tree. Have your students make a line of the bear’s adventure through the drawing making sure the line goes over the mountain, across the river, through the forest, and then up the big tree.
- For a fun active activity, try making some pretend obstacles in your classroom. You can use a big cardboard box or an empty overturned garbage can for the mountain, the river can be a blanket laid on the ground, the forest can be other students standing tall and still pretending to be trees, and the big tree can be a chair. Have your students pretend to be the bear one at a time and go through the obstacle course while the song plays in the background. As they go over, across, through and up in the obstacle course, have all the students watching shout out the preposition words as they watch the student in the course move through the obstacles. If you are worried about the safety of your students as they move through the obstacles, give your students a toy bear and have them take the bear through the course, going over, across, through and up!
- For more preposition vocabulary practice, try singing Open Shut Them #3 which features preposition vocabulary opposite pairs like over and under, and up and down.
More resources for this song (1)
