Thinking Thursdays: Art for "We're Going on a Bear Hunt"

Meet Mr Bear.  We've been reading all about him in the past 2 weeks, in all forms, mainly in cuddly teddy bear tales (click here for the list of bear titles).  And last week, we did some art work to give him some landscapes to run through (I'm sorry if he appears blur in the photos, since he was running too fast! :p), as inspired from the book "We're going on a bear hunt":

So here goes... We're going on a bear hunt!  We're going to catch a big one!

The boy drew all the backgrounds for me.  The little blue squiggle on top of the door is a window, according to him.
The door opens so that the people can run away from the bear and shut the door!

Uhoh!  Grass!

We cut the green strips of paper together, and he pasted down the flowers that I had pre-cut for him.

Uhoh!  A river!  Splash splosh, splash splosh!

The boy got to paint the background blue, then he added fish cut out by Papa from aluminium foil. 

Mud!  Thick oozy mud!  We can't go over it, we can't go under it...

We had to mix our own brown paint but the best we could come up with was this shade of muddy maroon.  The bottom was brown construction paper, dipped in water and scrunched up for texture.

Oh no!  We've got to go through it!  Stumble trip, stumble trip!

We rolled up brown strips of construction paper as tree trunks,
and cut the bottom bits into strips to represent the tree roots.  

Hooowhooooo, hooowhooooo!

This was toilet paper, plus white paint! 

Uhoh!  A cave!  A narrow, gloomy cave!  Tiptoe tiptoe...

We used newspaper to make the cave walls, then mixed up grey paint and the boy painted away!

Es ist ein Bär!!!  (We chanced upon a copy of the book in German, so we bought it too to read!)

Ok, anyway.  All the scenes were painted on strips cut out from a cardboard envelope (those you get from  Book Depository when you order books), and I added signboard descriptions using some leftover cardboard.  These I read out to the boy and he matched them to the scenes and we glued them down.  And finally, we read the book again, and we linked up the scenes and stuck them in a straight line using tape, so that the bear has plenty of room to run:

The boy had quite a bit of fun getting messy with paint and glue.  We also went for walks and squelched through mud, trudged through grass, and pretend-splashed through water.  Now that we're done with bears, we'll be exploring the Netherlands this week!

Update: Click here to read another mum's take on exploring this story!