Mrs. Cambria's Art Room

Paint Chip Bears

bear pattern paper

Materials:

Bears:

-copies of bear pattern paper

-paint color chips

-brass fasteners

-scissors

-glue

-crayons

-black permanent markers

Backgrounds:

-large sheets of construction paper

-oil pastels

-assorted colors of scrap paper

Teddy Bears Overview: These bears are made out of construction paper and those colored paint chips that you can pick up at home improvement stores, their arms and legs are movable because they are attached by brass fasteners, not glued on.  We also made backgrounds for the bears so they could be put into a local art show for elementary aged students at the Spring Creek Festival.  This project took most classes at least 2 weeks.

Bears:

1- Have each student choose a color among the paint swatches, they’ll need 2 pages of the same color.

2- Cut out the two rectangles on the bear pattern paper, and glue them to the back of the two paint swatch papers.  Once this step is done one side will be the color and the other side will be the bear patterns.

3- Cut out the body of the bear, don't cut out the limbs until later.

4- Color in the shapes of the belly, nose and ear holes, then cut them out.  (1st and 2nd grade can draw the ear holes onto the bear with marker.)

5- Glue the shapes of the belly, nose and ear holes onto the colored side of the bear body.  

6- Draw eyes above the nose with permanent marker.

7- Cut out the limbs.  Students can choose to keep the claws on or just cut them off.

8-  Poke holes in the spots on the body and limbs where the brass fasteners will go through the paper to connect the arms and legs. We used thumbtacks to poke the holes and pieces of foam core poster boards as cutting boards.

9- Connect the limbs with brass fasteners.

Your bears are finished!

By Emmalee

Backgrounds:

The second week of this lesson we made background for out bears.  It can be anywhere: under water, in space, a candy castle, a roller coaster or maybe just a normal bear cave near a river for the bear to fish in.  I let the students use their imaginations.  

- Start with one large sheet of colored construction paper for each student.

- Use scraps of construction paper and oil pastels to make any place the students want.

-Once the background is finished each student needs to write one sentence that starts with “My Bear.”  For example: “My bear is exploring Mars.” or “My bear lives in an ice cream shop so she can eat all the ice cream she wants.”

- For the students who got into the art show, we put Velcro on the back of the bears to connect them to their backgrounds so they can still take them off and play with them.  (Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to buy enough velcro for all 450 of my students.) 

Camilla, Braxton, Hannah, Addie, Hayden, and Anna

Who is this pretty lady?  It's me, Mrs. Cambria!

Hannah, Amelia, and Aubrey, all 3 sisters were in the art show!