Five Reasons Speech-language pathologist Love Brown Bear!
If you have a child in speech therapy, then I am more than sure you are familiar with this book! Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle is a timeless classic and a treasure trove for targeting language. These are just a few of the reasons we speechies here at AASL love it so much.
1. Vocabulary
Brown Bear has a plethora of vocabulary including animals, colors, verbs, and personal pronouns! To take it a step further, you can target more complex body parts of animals as well. The last page of the book provides a lovely illustration of all the animals together. This last page could be used to work on naming animals, counting, and identifying/pointing to the different animals. The repetitive use of “I” and “me” is excellent for auditory bombardment (exposing someone to the same sound or word many times).
2. Sentences
The repetitive nature of Brown Bear is also great for introducing and reinforcing carrier phrases. A carrier phrase is a simple sentence used to increase a child’s sentence length. This is extremely helpful for increasing sentence length in general as well as teaching them new sentence forms. The book primarily uses the sentences “I see a horse” and “What do you see?”. You can also incorporate your own phrases not in the book such as “I like bears” or “Duck says quack”. Use of descriptive terms is there, too! An example would be “BROWNbear”, “RED bird”, and etcetera.
3. Pre-Literacy Skills
