Little one by Jo Weaver

Hodder Children's Books, 2016. ISBN 9781561459247
(Age: 3+) Highly recommended. Bears. Mothers. Relationships. Survival. The beautifully rendered images of a mother bear and her cub will have all readers sighing over this book, as they turn the pages and are taken into the intimate world of the pair living through the warmer months before returning to hibernate in the winter. They wake to spring, and fresh out of the den where she has given birth over the winter months, she begins to show her cub what it needs to survive. They wander around their environment, smelling the flowers, looking at some of the animals, fishing in the stream, swimming in the lake. She shows him the night sky, the berries to eat, until she notices that the days are getting shorter, the leaves are blowing around them and winter is approaching. They then go back to their den to sleep over the long cold winter.
Children will love having this read to them, snuggled against their mother's warmth, feeling the comfort of the mother bear as she teaches her cub how to explore and live.
This will be a delightful book to share with a class, reiterating how mothers teach their children, exposing them to the variety of things done in a day, helping them learn to adapt to their environment, keeping them safe and happy.
The soft black and white illustrations suit the story admirably, making the eyes focus on the bear and her cub, giving clues as to their environment with deft images of their world.
I love this work and can see classes using it as a foundation for talk about mother's role in the family, or how families operate, or to look more closely at animals and the way they learn about their environment, and in particular, of course, bears.
Fran Knight