Crafts: Bear Painting

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Painting is a favorite pastime for our children. So, I like to find new and creative ways to allow them to paint. From using different materials as brushes like painting with leaves to using handprints, there are many fun ways to paint. We've also experimented with watercolors and using q-tips to paint, too! 

For this painting project, I wanted our children to focus on the background and not the animal they would include in the painting. So, we used a clipart drawing of a bear when the entire painting was completed and dry. 

Materials 

• Paint and Kwik Stix Paint
• Different types of paintbrushes
• Construction paper of varying colors 
• Foam shapes 
• Glue 
• Scissors 

Steps 

1. Gather your materials. 

2. Decide what color construction paper you and your children wish to use. Do you want to create a nighttime picture, a picture of a polar bear, or one in the forest? 

3. After choosing a piece of construction paper, pick what colors you want to use. Then start to paint your picture. 

4. After the picture dries, put on foam shapes and glue on your bear. 

5. Your picture is ready to hang! 

More Painting 

If you are getting ready to prepare for winter studies in your homeschool, I've shared a very cute book and a painting craft previously.  In Winter's Coming: A Story of Seasonal Change, your children will see numerous woodland animals. Pick one of the animals in the story and create a painting highlighting the change in the season.

Another fun way to incorporate painting into your homeschool lessons is to paint on a different medium. When we were reading Black Bird, Yellow Sun, we created a picture of the sun and a black bird using beans. After the beans were dry (we glued them on the paper), we painted the beans.

Looking for More Painting Lessons and Courses? 

Why not take a look at SchoolhouseTeachers.com? They offer over 400 courses, including many art courses. With so many schools limiting their electives, including art, homeschool families have the chance to explore art in a great number of ways. They can learn new techniques, study famous artists through history, and explore different mediums such as sculpture, painting, watercolor, and more. As I look through their course offerings, there are currently 19 art-related courses, including: 

• A Century of Art
• Achieving Art Success with ArtAchieve 
• All About Art
• Art & History: Interconnected 
• Art: The Timeless Treasure 
• Art Tips with Jan Bower
• Digital Art and Product Designs for Small Business
• Discovering Art History
• Drawing in Pen and Ink
• Drawing with Realism
• Elementary Art 
• Everyday Easels
• Exploring the World of Art
• Inkscape Online Adventure
• Learning About Art
• Let's Do Art Outside
• Preschool: Arts, Crafts, & Music
• Studio Art for Teens 

Crafts: Bear Figure

 

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Our daughter loves arts and crafts. This has always been one of her favorite parts of the homeschool day. So I love thinking of different crafts for us to create together using common household items and other materials we have on hand. 

While spending time learning about black bears, grizzly bears, polar bears, and more, I designed several different crafts including a collage, a paper bag puppet, and this bear figure. We also included some lessons from SchoolhouseTeachers.com as well as some favorite childhood books to read. 

Materials 

• Construction paper
• Paper towel or toilet paper roll 
• Scissors
• Tape
• Glue (glue stick or white glue) 
• Pencil or crayons 

Steps 

1. Gather all your materials. 

2. Cut out the pieces for your bear figure. You will need a large brown circle for the head, two small brown circles for the ears, one small orange, oval-like shape for the muzzle, one brown shape for the back legs, and two brown shapes for the arms. 

3. After the pieces are cut out, draw a face on the large circle. 

4. Draw a nose on the orange piece. 

5. Glue the orange muzzle on the large circle. 

6. Attach the large circle to the toilet paper roll. 

7. Attach the ears to the circle. 

8. Attach the back legs. 

9. Attach the front legs. 

10. After the glue dries, the bear figures are ready to play with! 

Looking for a Great Resource? 

As the fall season progresses, I love including seasonal content in our homeschool lessons. One of my favorite places to go to look for seasonal lessons is SchoolhouseTeachers.com. After clicking on their holiday and seasonal content, I go look through lessons, games, and more that fit into several different categories, including: 

• Christmas 
• Summer
• Easter
• Fall 
• Holiday/Seasonal (New Year's Day, President's Day, Mother's Day, Fourth of July, and many more!)  

For this season, I am looking at the Nature and Outdoors Homeschool Science Course for our daughter. There are units on owls and acorns that will we focus upon first. There are instructions for a nature journal and, since she likes her Bible Notebook which is part of the My Father's World Curriculum, I think this might be a hit with her, as well.

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. 

Learning about the Alphabet: B is for Baking

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Baking shortbread cookies

Over the course of twenty-six posts, I will introduce my own simple lessons for the letters of the alphabet. I will provide enough ideas and suggestions for a week's worth of activities.

For the letter B we focused on baking.

Coloring Pages

Super Coloring's Baker Coloring Page 
First-School Preschool Activities and Craft's Baker Coloring Page 
DLTK's Coloring Pages' Chef Coloring Pages

Baking Projects

Letter B as a Baker Craft

SchoolhouseTeachers.com's ABC: What Will I Be offers a great lesson on B is for Baker.

Baking Cookies

Getting into the kitchen and baking cookies with your preschooler is a wonderful way to share family time and incorporate education into your day. Your child can help gather ingredients, read the recipe, measure ingredients, and prepare the cookies for the oven.


Safety first! Please keep in mind that the oven is very hot and your child should be supervised at all times near an oven. Do NOT allow them to handle items going in and out of the oven. Use your due diligence to prevent injuries. Allow trays and cookies to cool after baking before allowing children to touch them again.

I have to admit that I love using the pre-measured cookie mixes like those sold by Betty Crocker.  They make it very easy when you need to make cookies quickly for an event. We have used the following mixes with good results: Sugar Cookie Mix, Salted Caramel (which is a limited edition mix), Rainbow Chocolate Candy, and the Pumpkin Spice (which is also a limited edition mix).

The 36th Avenue's Christmas Cookies - Funfetti Cookies 
This recipe calls for red and green sprinkles and M&M's but you can use other colors for the rest of the year, too.

Books

There are so many books out there teaching how to bake or cook with children. Visit the library or use one of the links below to learn about some of the books available.

Featured Shapes - Circle and Sphere

What better shapes are there than circles and spheres when you are taking about baking? So many cookie recipes ask you to roll your cookies into balls (or spheres) and then press flat (creating a circle shape).

One great way to incorporate a painting activity is with circles. Gather materials around your house that have a circular shape that could act as a stamp. For example, plastic cup, plastic lid, empty and clean yogurt container. Let your child use them as stamps with paint and a large sheet of paper.

Activities

Imagination Time: Play food

While talking about baking, allow your children to cook you a pretend dinner. In our household, we love the products from Learning Resources. They have such a variety of kits from fruit salads to healthy dinner baskets. They even have a baking set!

 

 

Visit a bakery

Watching older brother
pick out rolls for dinner

Rolls at our local bakery

Take the time to visit a bakery with your children. We are fortunate enough that we have bakeries that specialize in sweets and bread within driving distance of our home.

Clay Play

Use old cookie cutters and clay to let your children pretend to bake cookies. (Remind them not to put the clay in their mouths!)

Other 'B' Topics

Bees

I Heart Crafty Things' 15 Adorable Bee Crafts for Kids 
Included in this roundup of crafts are those that incorporate a variety of materials including paper bags, paper plates, paint, glue, craft sticks, and tissue paper among other items.

Ms. Barbara's Bees: A Preschool Study 
This includes many lessons to incorporate the study of bees into your preschool or homeschool including a really cool beehive created with egg cartons.

Butterflies

Fireflies + Mudpies' Coffee Filter Butterfly Craft 
This is a great craft for a warm day outside. We used to make similar butterfly crafts when I taught workshops at the zoo. Kids love seeing the marker colors spread and combine when spraying water on the filter.

Fun Learning for Kids' Butterfly Collage 
I always love the idea of giving kids materials and letting them create their own art project. Here is one you can do with butterflies as the base.

Parenting Chaos' b is for Butterfly Letter of the Week Craft 
This offers the lowercase letter b for the butterfly craft.

Mommies Reviews' Homeschooling Craft B is for Butterfly
Cute art craft using pasta to create a butterfly picture.

Birds - Bird Feeder

There are lots of interesting bird crafts that could accompany the letter B. And you can also make a bird feeder to hang outside allowing for some nature watching time. Please visit my Crafts - Animals Pinterest Board for more bird craft ideas.

The Resourceful Mama's Peanut Butter Toilet Paper Roll Bird Feeder 
We used to make these when I taught at the zoo. They were an easy way to prepare a bird feeder with just a few supplies.

Kitchen Counter Chronicles' Cookie Cutter Bird Feeders
These bird feeders use gelatin as the 'sticking' agent instead of peanut butter. Great if you (or a loved one) have a food allergy. They also allow for creativity and experimentation, if you and your children want to try different shapes than just the heart suggested.

Resources

First-School Preschool Activities and Craft's Alphabet Letter B Baker Theme
MPM School Supplies B is for Literacy Center Craftivity 
Sight and Sound Reading's Letter B Crafts