Another Celebrated Dancing Bear

For two half-weeks we read the book Another Celebrated Dancing Bear by Gladys Scheffrin-Falk. This book was so much fun and we really enjoyed learning about Russia. We made paper versions of the Russian stacking dolls (Matryoshka) and we made paper buildings with the very beautiful roofs.

We enjoyed reading about the four very different habitats found in Russia. The Taiga, Tundra, Forest and farmland. There are also Mountains, the largest freshwater lake in the world, (home to the only freshwater seal, the Nerpa) and the longest river in the world.  We are fascinated with animals of any kind and Tristan especially enjoys the animals of the arctic. These animals were his take-away from our weeks learning about Russia. He chooses to think that all of Russia is the far north, frozen taiga. I was interested to learn that some people see the brown bear a symbol of Russia. It is big, fierce and has no natural predators. It is also indigenous to the Russian forests and these bears were the main characters in the story. The kids thought it fascinating that bears were actually trained to dance in the circus. They also thought it strange that the bears in the book drank so much tea! It was a fun week.

For science we focused on changes of state using water. We looked at boiling point, melting point and freezing point. We added salt and sugar to water and timed to boil and added salt and sugar to ice cubes and timed to melt. We also ended the week by making fudge and fruit freeze pops. I hope the kids took a little away from these hands-on experiments.

We began learning our days of the week in Spanish and French, using the same song for all 3 languages (including English). And we began talking about time. Weeks, months, days and I introduced the clock. We will continue on this theme for a while until we are able to tell time a little bit and we will be learning the seasons as well.