My daughter loves anything to do with bears. So when we had the chance to check out this adorable children’s book about bears, she was thrilled. This powerful story shares the journey of a young bear who struggles with physical challenges that set him apart from other bears, providing an important lesson about perseverance and following your dreams, no matter the obstacles in your path.

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Three Paws was written and illustrated by Karen Struck. This adorable story follows a young bear named Boots who survived a scary accident that left him with a paw that doesn’t work. Despite his injury, Boots has big dreams of being a great salmon catcher. When he finds an injured goat, the animal begs Boots not to eat him, and promises to shower him with salmon. The other bears are furious that Boots would fall for the goat’s promises. But will his new friend prove his instincts to be good?

Falling Salmon Game

In the book, Boots is rewarded with salmon falling from the sky. We decided to have some fun with this scene by playing this easy game. To start with, I cut small fish shapes out of pink paper. I wrote sets of numbers on some of the fish and collections of dots on the rest of them. To play the game, I tossed the salmon into the air and let them fall to the ground around my daughter. I then encouraged her to find sets of matching pairs. If you are playing with more than one child, you can make this a race to see who can find more matches first. You could also try this with capital and lower case letters of the alphabet, or math problems and solutions.

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Bear Paw Cookies

We love taking any opportunity to get in the kitchen and cook together, so this book seemed like a good excuse to bake some delicious cookies. The adorable little bear in this story inspired us to make these easy bear paw cookies. First, we started with our favorite chocolate chip recipe. But instead of adding the chocolate chips to the batter, we baked the cookies without them. As soon as they came out of the oven, we added a chocolate wafer and three or four chocolate chips to the top of each cookie, pushing them in a little so they stuck. You could even use cookie dough from a tube to make these even easier!

Bear Printable Puzzle

Since we are working on vowels and consonants, I decided to create this printable puzzle inspired by Boots’ journey across the river. Print out this free puzzle page, and encourage kids to color the vowel spaces gray and the consonant spaces blue to show Boots the bear the path across. My daughter loves puzzles lately, so we had a lot of fun with this one.

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Jumping Over the River

In the story, Boots gets injured jumping across the river. So we decided to practice our jumping skills. First, I cut out rock shapes from gray paper and placed them in a line across the room. I encouraged my daughter to jump from rock to rock, and keep her balance when she landed. You can easily change this up to add practice in a certain skill. You could write letters or numbers on them and have kids jump to each one as you call them out, or have them jump to only odd numbers or consonants.

What are your favorite children’s books about bears? Share in the comments below!

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