Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?

Description

Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See? is the final collaboration from this bestselling author-illustrator team. Young readers will enjoy Baby Bear’s quest to find Mama, and they’ll revel in identifying each of the native North American animals that appear along the way. The central focus on the special bond between mother and child makes a fitting finale to a beloved series.
These groundbreaking picture books have been teaching children to read for over forty years, and their consistently strong sales prove their staying power and continued applicability for today’s kids.
A Children’s Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection

Bill Martin, Jr. (1916-2004) was an elementary-school principal, teacher, writer, and poet. His more than 300 books, among them the bestselling classics Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?; Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?; Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?; and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, are a testament to his ability to speak directly to children.
Martin held a doctoral degree in early childhood education. Born in Kansas, he worked as an elementary-school principal in Chicago before moving to New York City, where he worked in publishing developing innovative reading programs for schools. After several years, he devoted himself full-time to writing his children’s books. He lived in New York until 1993, when he moved to Texas. He lived in the east Texas woods, near the town of Commerce, until he passed away in 2004.
Eric Carle (1929-2021) was one of America’s leading children’s book illustrators and authors. Author of more than seventy books, his picture book career started when Bill Martin Jr invited him to create the illustrations for Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? That book that went on to sell millions of copies worldwide and Eric soon began writing and illustrating his own books, eventually creating the bestselling classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Born in the United States, Eric also spent many of his early years in Germany where he studied typography and graphic art at the Academy of Applied Art in Stuttgart.
Carle was the recipient of many honors including the American Library Association’s Children’s Literature Legacy Award and the Original Art Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Illustrators. In addition to writing and illustrating books of his own, he also collaborated on several others, including Bill Martin Jr’s Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Why Noah Chose the Dove, and the Eric Carle and Friends’ What’s Your Favorite picture book series. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, which Carle and his wife Bobbie founded, opened in Amherst, Massachusetts in 2002.

Discussion Questions
1. Read the first part of each new spread of the book that identifies the animal on that page. Ask your students how they know by looking what the animal is. What parts of the animal do they recognize? What is the animal doing that helps them to recognize it? Ask students to support their ideas with visual evidence from the pictures.
2. In some of the pictures we can see the animals in an environment (like the goat on rocks or the prairie dog digging in dirt). In pictures where an element of the environment is included ask students to describe it and make connections between what they see and what they know about the environment that animal lives in.
3. For pictures in which there is no environment depicted (like the flying squirrel or the blue heron) ask students what they know about the animal and where it lives. Then ask them to imagine the environment they might create for this animal. Eric Carle, the illustrator of this book, used very few clues to create the environment for the animals. Ask students what clues they would use.
4. Tell your students that Eric Carle creates animal images through collage—a process by which he pastes down paper in different shapes next to each other to form an animal. Before pasting the papers down on board, he paints them using tools like brushes, carpet or his fingers to create different textures. Tell students that texture is how something would feel if you could touch it. Ask students to look closely at the pictures and describe the textures they see. Ask older students if they can tell by looking how the texture was created. Have your students cut out different shapes and collage them into animals. Ask them to think about the shapes before they paste them onto the paper. What shape will make a good head for the animal they are making? What shapes will make good ears, etc.?
5. Each of the animals in the book is doing a different activity. Ask older students to come up with different verbs to describe what the animal might be doing (i.e. instead of “flying” the blue heron might be “soaring”).

“The elegant balance of art, text, emotion and exposition is a Martin and Carle hallmark; they have crafted a lovely finale to an enduring series.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)“A winning formula for keying new and pre-readers into colors, sequences and nature.” —Kirkus Reviews 

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