The Spawn and took a break from focusing on Math Drills all week (more on why we had to do this in another post) and did a project he has been excited about since he read Polar Bears Past Bedtime by Mary Pope Osborne two weeks ago.
SPOILER ALERT!! In the story, Jack and Annie “borrowed” a Polar Bear mask from a Seal Hunter’s igloo and used it when they were about to be attacked by a real Polar Bear on the ice. The Spawn said that when the Seal Hunters kill an animal, they give thanks to the animals spirit “by praising.”
The Seal Hunters in the book were most likely Inuit or First Nations people of Canada (Northwest Coast). They made masks of wood painted with round, circular, and curvy patterns. Such masks were used in rituals, such as the one The Spawn described from the book, to praise the animal spirits and also for storytelling and other traditions.
Inuit Polar Bear Masks
Using an art project from The Kids Multi-Cultural Art Book The Spawn made a Northwest Coast Storyteller Mask similar to the one Jack and Annie might have used in the book.
He began with a sketch of his mask, based on various Inuit Mask photographs I showed to him from the internet. I emphasized the style of Inuit art which makes use of lots of Red, Black, and White and just a little bit of blues and sometimes yellow and green. He was hesitant at first to draw a Polar Bear this way because he insisted that it didn’t look very much like a bear to him. But once he experimented with t he different design elements, he became very happy with his bear mask and has been wearing it all day!
We also watched the Disney movies Brother Bear
and Brother Bear 2
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