Weeks 29 & 30, Russia

Whew, these past two weeks have flown by! Russia was a really fun country to study, I didn't expect that. Plus, we are beginning to see various year long curriculums being completed and that's certainly a fun thing! It's hard to believe that we just have 4 weeks left until our first year is officially over. Wow! Where did the time go??
Here are some of our exciting activities from the last two weeks...
The one thing that always reminds me of Russia is the faberge egg. We made our own version by using real egg shells I had blown out. Those were fun!




We also made Russian nesting dolls, called matrioshka dolls. I saw that Hobby Lobby had kits to make them and asked my mom to grab some before she came to visit. The girls were so thrilled! This may have been their favorite craft all year so far. Fun!



Kaylin's dolls:

Annlee's dolls:

Maryella's dolls:


We talked about ballet since classical ballet came from Russia. The curriculum suggested talking to a ballet teacher about the positions in ballet. I happen to have 4 little girls living in my house who know the positions already, though. Maryella wanted to demonstrate and asked me to put the pictures here.


Here is the lapbook piece we made for ballet information


Our Russia lapbooks turned out great. I was proud of how they decorated the covers. Sometimes they don't want to take the time to draw on them, but they all did a good job with these.





These are their animals they drew from the tundra to include in their lapbooks. I thought they did such a great job with these!
Kaylin's animals


Annlee's animals


Maryella's animals


Each of those animal pictures has a fun fact about that animal on the back. Here is Kaylin writing her polar bear fact.



Studying the tundra was our science topic for these past two weeks. It's a pretty interesting place. We did an experiment to help us understand permafrost and why the ground is wet and muddy. During the summer, when the snow and ice melts, it can't seep into the ground because once you go down a little in the ground, you get to the permafrost layer.
Top soil on the permafrost (represented by jello):

Adding "snow" to the top of our "tundra":


After the snow melted, it left very muddy dirt that couldn't soak down deep because the permafrost (jello) was solid. So it just sat on top, just like in the real tundra during the summertime.


We did this experiment with ice and gloves to see how the layers of fur and blubber help to keep animals warm in the tundra.



We tried pulling heavy books on a smooth surface and a rough surface to understand why sleds are used a lot on the ice for a means of travel.



I thought Annlee did a great job with this. This is a geyser that she drew during our vocabulary time.


We watched several videos about Russia and the Arctic tundra. These were two of them. We also watched Peter and the Wolf. (We listened to it as well)


And then this picture gets a big Woo Hoo! Maryella finished her All About Spelling Level 1 curriculum. Exciting stuff!


I love this picture! When the girls get finished with their work for the day, they have become fascinated with watching animal videos on You Tube. This one was a National Geographic video following the life of an elephant named Echo on a reserve in Africa. It was very long and they were glued to it the whole time.

I love how curious they are! I am encouraging this latest phase but at the same time, I'm keeping a close eye on them. You never know what you might stumble across on You Tube!