Another Celebrated Dancing Bear

Another Celebrated Dancing Bear




November 7-11, 2005





We started this week out with finding Russia on the map. Gosh how it looked SO far away. 2ds6 even knew right away, before we found it on the map, that Russia is way on the other side of the world from us. But then we started looking at Russia on our globe and noticed that actually, if we flew from our home to California, then on to Alaska, that we could simply hop on a boat and sail right to Russia! That seemed much closer than flying all the way around the world. We then colored a map and made flags of Russia.





For Language Arts we first went over some words from the book that were new to us (czar, elegant, glum, samovar, magnificent, jealous, audience, marvelous, embraced, pyramid, and comical). Now when we hear these words again, we’ll know just what they mean! We also talked about how it is important to take your time in titling your stories in order to have one that is just perfect and not one that had no thought go in to it. And lastly, we noticed how the author used some ‘descriptive writing’ to make the characters more interesting. We played with this for just a bit, coming up with more descriptive ways of saying things.





With many of the books we’ve read, we’ve noticed that several places around the world have a piece of architecture that, when we see it, tells us where that book or movie or story is taking place. For example, we’ve studied the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, the Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Statue of Liberty in New York City. So with this book we looked at the onion-shaped tops to many Russian buildings. We looked at pictures in several different books, then drew our own picture of them. 3ds5 said instead of onions the roofs look like ‘chocolate’, meaning Hershey’s Kisses! Mom thought that was very observant of him. Now when we see these ‘Hershey Kiss-topped buildings’, we’ll know we’re looking at Russia!





And finally, we remembered that Max and Boris would put the samovar on to boil to make tea, so we talked about how water can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas. We pretended we were the molecules in the water in each of these forms and moved as they would depending upon what state they were in. We also ate ‘strawberry preserves on brown bread’ and mom and 3ds5 were even brave and tasted tea, but it’s safe to say that we are not a tea-drinking family!