A coloring page of a teddy bear sitting in a field of tulips, a butterfly overhead and a strawberry held in its paws. The outlines are thick and the petals and leaves are generous in size, so it suits small hands and anyone who would rather not work at fine detail. Giving each tulip a different color is the quickest way to make the finished page sing. Free to download and print, no registration needed.
🖊 Teddy Bear, Butterfly and Tulips — Line Art (free, printable)
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Did you have a teddy bear of your own? What do you remember about it?
When you hear news of bears coming into towns, what does it make you think about people and wild places?
Was there a bear in a picture book or a cartoon you loved as a child?
Are you fond of stuffed bears and bear-themed things?
Which bears live in Japan?
Two kinds. The brown bear lives in Hokkaido and the Asian black bear on Honshu. The brown bear is Japan’s largest land animal: big males commonly run to 150–250 kg and occasionally pass 300 kg. The black bear is called tsukinowaguma, “moon-ring bear,” after the white crescent on its chest. On Shikoku only a few dozen black bears are left, and the Kyushu population is treated as extinct.
Why do bears hibernate?
Because the food runs out. Bears eat heavily through the autumn to lay down fat, then hole up in a den and let their heart rate and breathing slow until spring. It is not the deep hibernation of a ground squirrel: a bear’s body temperature falls only a few degrees, and it can rouse and respond if something disturbs the den. Females give birth in there in midwinter and nurse their cubs while still going without food.
Where does the “teddy” in teddy bear come from?
From Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. On a hunt in Mississippi in 1902 he refused to shoot a bear that had been cornered and tied to a tree, calling it unsportsmanlike. A newspaper cartoon of the scene redrew the animal as a small, wide-eyed cub, and a Brooklyn shopkeeper, Morris Michtom, put a stuffed bear in his window as “Teddy’s bear.”
