A favorite book in the classroom is The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Don Wood. The story is simple, and easy for children to remember. On the second reading, children are able to recite parts of the book. The Little Mouse is trying to keep his red, ripe strawberry from the big hungry bear. He hides it, disguises it, and locks it up. None of these are effective until the reader makes a suggestion.
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The children were asked to come to our virtual circle time in disguise so they wouldn’t be found by the big hungry bear.
Once the children were gathered on Zoom.us, the story was read over a shared screen. I no longer mute the children while the story is read. Our group size is small so it is fun to hear the children react to the story. The following link is the read-a-loud I used during our virtual circle time.
Our activity was a strawberry hunt. I obtained the background images from https://unsplash.com/. This site offers free images to use. I created a slideshow on PowerPoint. I added the circles and then used animations to have them appear one at a time.
The children were unmuted during the activity. They counted, used preposition words, and described the locations of the strawberries. Many different skills were used during the strawberry hunt.
We finished the virtual circle time with a song about fruits and vegetables. This allowed the children to move around!