Bears, Bears, Everywhere!

Lesley Koplow offers teachers a proven way of addressing social and emotional issues in the classroom. In Bears, Bears Everywhere!, Koplow shares innovative strategies for integrating Teddy Bears into classroom life and the curriculum itself to help teachers address unresolved emotional issues that hinder children's socialization and learning processes. She explains how using Teddy Bears as transitional objects can help children connect to their feelings and express them in constructive ways, establishing a safe and supportive learning environment. To help teachers integrate the Teddy Bear method into core curriculum, the text includes lesson plans, grade-specific activities (pre-K-5th grade), sample dialogue, children's writing and drawing, and full-color photographs. Offering both a conceptual framework and a practical blueprint, this helpful book: Provides specific techniques and curriculum strategies to promote emotional well-being and pro-social behavior with both young children and school-age students. Helps teachers to integrate bears into daily routines, including arrival, story time, rest time, choice time, group time, transitions, and departure. Examines the use of bears as a bridge to literacy. Shares the author's experience using bears in the upper grades with students who have experienced trauma (post-9/11), homelessness, recent immigration, or other unsettling circumstances.

Lesley Koplow is the director of the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street College in New York City.