Crafts: Bear Collage

 

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Whenever I prepare crafts for our children, I usually save the scraps of paper and construction paper in a plastic envelope and several gallon size plastic bags. There are many times when I need only a small piece of black construction paper for eyes or maybe a bit of red to create a tongue for an animal puppet. My storage has been filling up so I decided to do a simple craft with our daughter to use up some of the pieces. 

We've been talking about bears in our homeschool as we study different animals and habitats using her science curriculum, so it seemed natural to design several different bear crafts. For this one, I look for a silhouette of a bear online to draw onto a sheet of white paper. I then asked her to trace this bear for her own paper. After that, it was quite simple to create our bear collage. 

Materials 

• White Paper
• Scraps of Construction Paper
• Glue Stick or White Glue
• Scissors
• Pencil or Marker

Steps 

1. Draw a picture of your bear. Make sure it is large and covers the whole paper. 

2. Gather all the materials nearby. 

3. You may want to pre-cut the pieces of construction paper scraps to fit the outline of your bear. Our daughter and I cut our pieces as we went along to make sure we had the pieces we wanted. 

4. Glue the pieces onto your bear filling in the outline. 

5. Display your completed bear collage. 

What to Know More About Bears? 

How many bears can you name? According to National Geographic, "there are eight species: Asiatic black bears (also called moon bears), brown bears (which include grizzly bears), giant pandas, North American black bears, polar bears, sloth bears, spectacled bears (also called Andean bears), and sun bears." They all belong to the Ursidae family and are omnivores. They range in size from four feet to eight feet and live in a variety of habitats. If you want to study just those who are native to North America, you would limit your studies to the North American black bear, brown bears, and polar bears. 

North American Black Bear 

The most common bear in North America is the black bear which can actually be a number of different colors and shades including black, a cinnamon brown color, blonde, gray/glue, and even white. Depending upon where the black bear lives in North America, the color, diet, sleeping pattern, and more may be different. The National Park Service offers a nice comparison between black bears who live in two different habitats in North America.  

Black bears have a varied diet and the specifics depend upon where they live and the time of year. As omnivores, they eat plants and meat. They eat roots, berries, fish, and insects, and are able to kill and eat adult deer. Unfortunately, they are also attracted to human garbage, livestock food, and fruit trees planted on farms, which brings them into contact with humans. This can cause problems as they become a nuisance to humans or no longer see humans as a threat. 

Learn More at SchoolhouseTeachers.com 

SchoolhouseTeachers.com offers a number of courses for your children to learn more about animals including God's Beautiful Creatures. In this course, students in kindergarten through second grade discover over a hundred animals including the brown bear and polar bear and red deer, European rabbits, mandarin ducks, arctic terns, and much more! This homeschool science course is perfect for early readers as the books are simple and the activities include journaling and drawing.