Goldilocks and the Three Bears

This week we have been reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Traditional Tales have been enjoyed and passed on by many generations. They often have a moral linked to them and are repetitive which helps children to learn them. Goldilocks and the Three bears discusses opposites – too cold and too hot, too hard and too soft and too bouncy and too firm. It has three different sized bears bringing in the mathematics element and the repetitive language helps children to remember and recite the story. There is so much mark making and writing that can be done too!

Start by reading the story a few times, at bedtime and during the day and watch a cartoon of it on YouTube by which time your child will be familiar with it.

Activities

Role Play: The Goldilocks Story

You will need:

  • 3 bears – if you don’t have bears than improvise with other animals and a doll.
  • Bowls and spoons – if possible a big, medium and small one.
  • Some form of beds – we used baking tray, a doll bath and a tupperware box
  • Some form of chairs – we used a tin, cup and pot. It doesn’t matter what you use but ideally, you would have a big, medium and small one.
  1. Say the story together and then use the bears and Goldilocks to act out the story.
  2. Use different voices for each of the bears and discuss the sequence of the story as you progress through.
  3. Use the mathematical language of big, medium and small when mentioning the bears.

Bear Bread

This is a winning activity for everyone!

  1. Make Daddy, Mummy and Baby Bear bread using bread, peanut butter, bananas and raisins.
  2. When making them, discuss the size and decide together where the ears, eyes and nose go.

Eating them is the best part. Peanut butter, bananas and raisins altogether is an unexpected delight!

Maths: Size Sorting

Help! The bears have lost their belongings and need help to find theirs.

For this activity you will need to find items of the same thing in 3 different sizes – big, medium and small.

  1. Place the objects on the floor.
  2. Your child chooses an object, finds all 3 of them and places them in front of themselves.
  3. Ask your child to find the biggest spoon for Daddy Bear, then the smallest spoon for Baby Bear and the medium sized spoon for Mummy Bear.
  4. Repeat with the other objects in a different size order.

To challenge them, you can place them back in the pile and they can try to sort them independently.

Science: Hard and Soft Sorting

As the Daddy Bear’s chair was too hard and Mummy Bear’s chair was too soft, you can feel lots of objects and decide if they were soft or hard. You could do this activity inside your home, putting tape or string on the floor or outside in your garden.

  1. Find lots of hard and soft objects from around your home.
  2. Create a sorting table, ;like in the photo below and label it hard and soft.
  3. Ask your child to feel the objects and discuss if they are hard or soft.
  4. Place the object in the right place.

If your toddler find it difficult to differentiate between hard and soft, don’t worry, textures are hard to describe as a toddler!

Baking Flapjacks

As Goldilocks likes porridge so much, make her flapjacks so that she wouldn’t go back to the bear’s house again to eat their porridge again.

We wrapped up one of the flapjacks, put her name on it and left it outside our house, ready for Goldilocks to collect it. Then we ate the rest! Delicious!

Messy Play: Porridge Sensory

As the bears liked to eat porridge, have some messy play with porridge oats, using a baking tray, 3 different sized spoons and bowls and some water.

This kept my daughter entertained for 45 minutes – she poured water in and out of the bowls, mixed in the porridge oats, pretended to feed the bears and stirred everything till is was a mushy mess! She loved it!

Writing: Letter to Goldilocks

Goldilocks did not make the right choice when she was eating the bear’s porridge so she needs to say sorry to them! We decided on a sentence together and my daughter wrote it down. I then wrote down the sentence we had decided so that she can see the meaning to the marks she makes.

To challenge older children they could try to write the first sound of each word or when ready, the whole word, listening carefully to each sound in the word. See more on this here