Reading Bearathon

On the last day of our unit, we had an all-day readathon—reading marathon—well, all right, we just went ahead and called it a "Bearathon." We made hot cocoa in the crock pot, the children made cozy little nests, and everyone just read and read and read. It was great.

Abe's slightly over-ambitious stack of reading material

Silly.

Marigold, seeing all the bears around, decided it was a sort of Bear Buffet from which she could take her pick of bears. She was so happy!

So much fun!

Famous Bears

There are so many great bears in stories! We talked about some of the most famous ones like Winnie-the-Pooh and Paddington. 

We've always liked Smokey the Bear
More about Smokey
And some pretty awesome old advertisements for him here.

We enjoyed the movie A Bear Named Winnie---it's based on a true story about a Canadian Bear that ended up in the London Zoo. (And the real Christopher Robin, A.A. Milne's son, did indeed visit this bear and re-name his own bear, Edward Bear, after Winnie.)

We watched, and liked, Disney's "Bears".

We also really liked Bears of the Last Frontier—all three episodes.

Gummi Bear Graphing

There's a pizza buffet we go to sometimes which, for awhile (before they took the costs of my children into account, presumably) had Gummi Bears as one of the "salad bar" items. (??) The children treated them like manna from heaven. They'd get a bunch of gummi bears and then line them up in rainbow order and compare them with each others' and eat them carefully one color at a time.

So, I decided to buy a bag of Gummi Bears and put all that OCD behavior to good use making graphs. We created various types of graphs and charts of Bear Color, and made estimates, and drew conclusions, about the number of bears per color per bag. Very interesting (and the children thought the bears were SUCH a special treat!).

Teddy Bear Picnic

Bear buns. Just a regular roll recipe, shaped like bears by sticking on balls of dough for the ears and muzzle (though there are a few definite NON-bears on this pan---a monkey and at least one pig).

On holidays we usually have some sort of school party, and Halloween fell during this unit, so we took the not-terribly-creative course of having a Teddy Bear's Picnic. (It was the most beautiful of Indian Summer days! Positively hot outside!) I'm really not a very good or motivated "party planner," but I'm willing to go to a little extra effort if it seems like it will be worth it. And for a Teddy Bear Picnic, there is so much cute Bear-themed food you can find ideas for! Also, we already had lots of bear costumes around, so the children had no trouble disguising themselves. 

We got out our parachute and played games with it. The stuffed bears got bounced on top and had quite a fun time doing so.

We didn't eat all of these foods at our picnic (the bear buns and the pancakes were actually on other days), but all of them would have worked nicely for it.

We cut out bear-shaped toast with cookie cutters.

Bear pancakes (another day)—they were cuter here.

The best parts of the Teddy Bear Picnic, in Daisy's opinion, were the invitations. A big one for each child—a smaller one for that child's bear—and an even tinier one for that bear's bear. I just made them out of bear silhouettes.

I just used bear silhouettes and typed words on them (obviously).

We had this delicious pudding with berries on it. Again, the main attraction was that there were tiiiiiny sizes—so the children could feed their bears too.

The bears liked it. They liked their bowls of one Gummi Bear and one Teddy Graham, too.

A bear.

Hey, how did these monkeys get in?

It really was a great picnic (and Halloween Party)!

And furthermore, on the subject of Teddy Bears:

History of the teddy bear—we also had several good books from the library about Teddy Roosevelt and the story of the first Teddy Bear

Project Teddy Bear, sponsored by the Bank of American Fork. We're going to donate to this at Christmastime this year.

Bear Sleepover

I can't even tell you how many school teachers' blogs I read, while I was looking around for Bear Unit ideas, that described a "bear sleepover" where the students brought in their stuffed bears and then discovered them up to all kinds of trouble in the classroom the next day. I thought the kindergartner and preschooler among us would particularly appreciate such a thing, so accordingly, the children gathered all their bears in the living room one night for a sleepover. There are many, many bears in this house.

Although not all of them are, strictly speaking, bears.

Anyway, there was much surprise and delight when the girls discovered what mischief the bears were up to the next morning! They laughed and laughed. It was so fun to watch them notice each new thing.

Well worth the slight effort, really. Those rascally bears! :)

Panda Bears and Panda Cupcakes

Who can resist a panda bear? We can't. When I was young, biologists believed pandas weren't true bears, but instead relatives of the raccoon. Now that classification has been re-evaluated through DNA testing, and all is right with the world: pandas ARE bears! We loved making these adorable cupcakes, as shown (to ultimate cuteness, of course) on Bakerella. (We just used a cake mix and our regular frosting recipe, but followed her decorating instructions. They're really easy to make.) Note that these are mini-cupcakes: if you make full-size ones, chocolate chips are too small to be the right size for the panda bear eyes.

I loved the range of personalities these little guys had. Seb and Abe made the funniest expressions on their faces!

With as popular as pandas are, there's no shortage of videos and resources. Here are some we liked:

Live Panda Bear Cam at the National Zoo

Perhaps the cutest video ever?: panda bears on a slide

This was so funny, and darling. We read a book about a wildlife preserve in China where the workers wear panda suits in order to keep the bears unaccustomed to humans. It's the same place where they have a panda kindergarten.

This panda kindergarten book telling about it was Daisy's absolute favorite. She wanted to read it over and over (she seemed to really identify with the little pandas—"They're in kindergarten, just like me!").

More kindergarten pictures to enjoy

And still more cute panda pictures. 

Polar Bears and Polar Bear Paintings

We had a great time learning about Polar Bears and especially liked painting these arctic winter scenes. There is a great tutorial for the paintings here: arctic polar bear paintings. Instead of plain white, we used this puffy paint, which made the bears look even furrier and bear-ier.

I liked seeing the variation in how these paintings turned out. The blog linked above suggested that the children use plastic wrap pressed on the wet paint to create a cracked, icy texture on the blue ground. That worked pretty well in some of the pictures:

But not so well in others. On the other hand, the salt crystals in the sky in this picture made quite a nice snowy effect.

This is probably one of our favorite art projects we've ever done. We just love those wintry, puffy bears!

Some more polar bear stuff:

Polar bears have clear, hollow fur, and under the right conditions, it can actually turn green!

Not really about bears, but interesting when discussing the arctic: how to build an igloo 

The boys loved this polar bear "spy camera" so much!
They thought this was hilarious, too.

Bear Den/Cave (Geodesic Dome)

During our Architecture Unit, we built a Geodesic Dome out of newspaper, and it was one of our favorite activities. It was also one of those activities where you get better at it as you go along, and by the time it was all built we were convinced we could make it even stronger and nicer if we just started over. So we vowed to do the activity again sometime, and my mom saved newspapers for us.

This Bear Unit seemed like a great opportunity to finally revisit the geodesic dome, since we could cover it with blankets and use it as a bear den!

Original instructions for the dome are here. This time we used three sheets of newspaper for each strut (as opposed to two last time), which seemed to make them a lot sturdier. We also used pencils or chopsticks to roll the tubes around (pulling the pencils out once the tubes were rolled) and keep them nice and thin. And we connected our joints with a flatter tape formation, as above. The joints are really the trickiest part, since they tend to collapse at stress points. Last time we tried staples to make them stronger, but that didn't work too well. We still had a few that seemed weak, but the wide, flat tape-joint seemed to work better.

The bears loved their cozy home!

After we covered it with sheets and blankets to make it nice and snug, we talked about hibernation and bear cubs inside this "den," and spent lots of time just cuddling and reading Bear books and playing Bear. Very fun!