Polar Bear Theme
A collection of resources for a polar bear theme

Posted by Kerry Weisner, of BC, Canada on the first grade mailring at Teachers.Net.
http://teachers.net/mailrings

I'll tell you a secret
About the polar bear.
He really does wear...
Underwear!

Bear Coat

The polar bear, the polar bear -
He has a handsome coat to wear

But, while it's thick and warm and white
He has to wear it day and night.

And when the summer comes, poor brute,
He wears it for his swimming suit.

Although his coat is thought so fine,
I'm very glad that it's not mine.

polarbear.pdf

click the image for the printable file

The Polar Bear (Tune: My Bonnie)

The polar bear lives in the Arctic,
He never gets cold in a storm,
He swims in the icy cold water,
His heavy coat keeps him warm.

Warm, warm, warm, warm,
His heavy coat keeps him warm.
Warm, warm, warm, warm,
His heavy coat keeps him warm!

Camouflage!

The polar bear has a white fur coat,
Sometimes he walks quite slow.
It's hard to see just where he is...
He looks just like the snow!

There is a neat experiment you can do with the camouflage poem. I got it from a wonderful classroom website of someone in California but I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the person. First have precut shapes of a polar bear ready - cut out of white paper. Each child gets two. The first one is glued to a totally white piece of paper - I used about a 5 inch square. The other one also gets glued to another square of the same size but first you have the kids draw a habitat that would be different than the Arctic. For instance, they could draw a jungle, forest, city or farm scene. Of course, when you glue the second polar bear down he stands out like a sore thumb. On the first, all-white square, representing the Arctic environment, he blends right in. This gives them a very good understanding of how natural camouflage works. The kids in my class loved this.

Here is the shape I used to cut out the polar bear shapes for this experiment. I just made it smaller.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/
pgifs/Polarbear_bw.GIF

Note: Ellison Die-cuts polar bears also work well for this.
http://www.ellison.com
http://shop.ellison.com/catalog/
proddetail.cfm?SKU=B30501-SM

On the original site, the teacher did not have the kids draw a background. Instead she had them use bingo dabbers to colour the background. She used it in conjunction with the book, Snow Bear, by Jean Craighead George.

more information

Here's a good link with a few more experiments that may connect with what you are doing:
http://www.angelfire.com/ma/
1stGrade/arctic.html

polarbear2.pdf

click the image for the printable file

More polar bear clipart:
http://home.earthlink.net/~schepps/
potteryAteach/tgifs/polarbear.JPEG

http://www.dltk-teach.com/books/
brownbear/clips/spolarbear.gif

http://www.palecrescent.com/images/
polar%20bear.jpg

http://www.kbasic.org/1/logo_ideas/
kbasic_bear.jpg

http://www.abcteach.com/Themeunits/
arctic/images/polbea3.gif

http://www.abcteach.com/Themeunits/
arctic/images/concen1.gif

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
coloringbook/images/
sketches/polarbear.gif

http://207.228.250.31/images/
clipart/zoo_animals/images/
lp_za_ff_img09_polarbear.gif

http://www.nature.ca/notebooks/
images/polarbr.gif

http://www.igrandparents.com/
grandtopics/articles/images/
printables/polarbear1small.gif

http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/resources/
kids/polarb.jpg

http://www.first-school.ws/images/
animals/cp/polarbear.gif