Polar Bear Coloring Page
About This Coloring Page
A polar bear is the winter animal that is not a Christmas animal, which makes this page useful from November straight through to February. Most children know it from picture books and know the one fact about it — it lives where it is cold — and that single fact is enough to start a conversation about ice, snow and why the bear needs such thick fur.
The drawing is two bears, a big one and a small one, and the size difference is the first thing a child notices. Mother and cub, or big bear and little bear: either way it is a page about comparing, and a child will usually assign themselves to one of them before they start.
The fur is drawn as outline only, which raises the best question this page can ask: what colour is a polar bear? White, says the child. So what do you colour? Leaving the bears as paper and colouring everything around them — the ice, the snowflakes, the sky — is a decision a child makes on their own, and it is a more interesting one than filling in a shape.
Skills Practiced
How to Use This Coloring Page
- Ask what colour a polar bear is. Then ask what that means for the crayon. The answer — leave it white, colour the rest — is theirs to reach.
- Colour the snowflakes one point at a time. Six narrow arms each, several flakes. Small bounded shapes are where control gets built.
- Which bear is you? Big one or little one. Then who is the other one. The story takes care of itself from there.