The Three Bears

In a cabin in the woods there lived three bears. One day, the bears went out for a walk before having breakfast; and Goldilocks found the house empty…

Considered an anonymous folkloric tale, it was made popular in 1837 by the British poet Robert Southey, perhaps based on an older version. In Southey’s version, as in that of Eleanor Mure, published six years earlier, the intruder was a mean old woman; in 1849, Joseph Cundall published his "Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children" explaining the reasons for changing the old woman for a girl.

Focusing on the traditional story, and without drifting away from the idea that intimacy should be respected, this version by Marisa Núñez establishes a link between the narrator and the reader which helps to facilitate an identification of the child with the bears, strengthening the formative efficiency of the story; with the excuse of explaining the characters actions, the narrator contributes, confidentially, a series of habits and good manners that point to the sense of responsibility, autonomy and the good use of freedom.

Besides influencing in the behavioural and affective development, and stimulating artistic and literary sensibility, we find ourselves before a good instrument to transmit mathematical concepts, to understand notions of size (big, medium, small) or to establish functional relations between the animals and the environment to which they relate.

The images by Minako Chiba also contribute to the development of the visual abilities that help the early reader to acquire the necessary vocabulary for the mathematical understanding of numbers and concepts.