Polar Bear Silhouettes

Today we learned about the polar bear. My art project idea changed several times throughout the day. My original idea was to place a template of a bear on white paper and have the kids spray different colors of paint over it, then remove the template to reveal a white bear. But after only finding one spray bottle, I decided to have the kids paint their papers with watercolors. I tried my best to explain the northern lights to them, but it's a pretty hard concept to understand! I told them to paint streaks of color on their paper.

 

Then I had a bunch of white cut-outs of polar bears. (I just did a google search for polar bear silhouettes and used a few as my templates.) But when I held up the white bears on the paper, it was hard to see the outline, especially if the child didn't paint their entire paper. You would think I would have checked this after cutting out one bear, but no. I had cut out about 15 bears. So I scratched that and decided to do black. After all, the northern lights come out at night and so the bears wouldn't look white anyway! Then I was going to have the kids rip black paper up to make the ground, but the torn look just wasn't doing it for me. It looked like mountains instead of snow or ice. So I straightened them out a bit with a scissors.

Finally, the kids glued on the bear silhouettes, which I re-cut in black. (Thank goodness for nap time!) There was enough room for one big bear and one little bear.

I hung them in the window so the sun can shine through the northern lights. They are much prettier than these pictures show.

 

 

Fun Fact: Humans are polar bears only predator.