The Berenstain Bears Book Review

Choosing the Theme

Since it is autumn for the majority of my blogging friends, I decided to do a book review with a theme around bears. I had bears on my mind, because it will soon be time for them to hibernate and also because of the winter blanket that has pictures of cute teddy bears that my mom sent from the States to the kids a few years ago.

Choosing the Book

I borrowed three different children’s bear books from the library, all from different authors and read them to Amanda. Her favorite one was The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Vacation by Stan and Jan Berenstain.

Creating the Scene

We created the scene for this book review by putting together a teddy bear picnic. We grabbed all the teddy bears from her stuffed animal bag. It was a fun discovery adding bear after bear to the pile. I don’t think either of us realized how many bears she owns, which includes those passed down from her sisters. Then we arranged our picnic. She helped set the table and arrange the bears with the winter blanket in the background.

In the final photo, she chose her favorite bear for the day. The funny thing is that she doesn’t have a special toy, doll, stuffed animal or book. Her favorite things change from day to day. The bear she chose is appropriate when you add the Teddy Bears' Picnic song to the mix with these lyrics, “At six o'clock their Mommies and Daddies will take them home to bed 'cause they're tired little Teddy Bears.”

I checked out several YouTube versions of this song with Amanda and finally decided on this one, because it’s short and peppy. My mother-in-law used to sing it to Jeremiah when he would fuss as a toddler and it often helped to calm him down.

About the Story

Have you ever had too much vacation where you wished that it would come to an end? That is the situation for this family of bears. Their vacation is seemingly ruined by a series of events. One thing that made this holiday particularly unpleasant was the rain. When I got to this part of the story, Amanda asked, “Mommy, how come they didn’t look in the news and they didn’t know?” She knows that her daddy often checks on the internet to see what kind of weather we’ll be having, so that we can plan around it.

Who doesn’t take a camera with on vacation? This bear family takes pictures of their experiences. Amanda’s favorite part of the story is when Papa bear gets swept out of the rented cottage from the flooding caused by the rain. I think she found many of the misadventures humorous. Their holiday photos later bring them lots of laughs. They learn that the worst vacation can be the best of all. I think it’s a good lesson to learn, because things don’t always go our way and we need to be able to take the good with the bad.

Below is a summary of interesting facts from Wikipedia:

Stanley Berenstain and Janice Grant met in 1941 on their first day of drawing class at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, where they formed an immediate bond. They were separated during World War II, later reunited and wed in 1946. Since the 1962 debut of the first Berenstain Bears book, The Big Honey Hunt, the series has grown to over 300 titles and has also expanded well beyond the books, including two television series.

The Berenstain Bears website is celebrating their 50th Anniversary of when it all began. Visit their site for coloring pages and more.

I'll be posting more photos of

our new kitty later today on my

Picture Perfect Party Linky blog hop.

I have a "Pin it" button on my sidebar so you can

pin any favorite images to your Pinterest boards.

You might like to read my post "Thrown Away" about a teddy bear

that gets thrown out, because the spoiled child doesn't want it.

The book is called Throwaway Bear and would make a great

Christmas present for children.