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Bear Hugs
Meet the Care Bears!
By Carma Haley Shoemaker
Learning With Care Bears
While the Care Bears are great as a child's toy or friend, they can also be a creative teaching tool. Parents have a variety of games or activities they can do with their child, while including the child's Care Bear pal, that hold a lot of learning value.
A few activities and games include:
- Expressing or understanding feelings – Care Bears are designed so each one represents a single emotion or feeling. Parents can use the related feelings or emotions to help their child understand what it means to be cheerful, wishful, loving, etc.
- Teaching colors – Care Bears come in a rainbow of colors and are a perfect visual aid to help a child practice and/or learn their colors.
- Teaching shapes – Using the shapes on the bellies of the Care Bears is a fun way to help a child learn them. From the star, moon, rainbow and heart, parents can use a 'best friend' to help a child master a task.
- Learning symbols: Symbols are all around us – street signs, books, billboards and even on television. Using the creative pictures on the Care Bears bellies is a great way to teach a child what symbols are and why we use them.