Russia Unit Study

When I saw we were going to be studying Russia for history, I wanted to do the Five in a Row book, Another Celebrated Dancing Bear. I was disappointed to find that our library system doesn't have it. I was able to find a lot of other good books for our unit study though. The ones the kids enjoyed most were The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, The Littlest Matryoshka, The Magic Nesting Doll, A Perfect Pork Stew, Babuska Baba Yaga, and Babuska's Doll.
We read a few non-fiction books to learn more about life in Russia and the history.
We read Peter and the Wolf, listened to some of it, and watched this cartoon.
We also read about Tchaikovsky's life and discussed the ballets he composed.

We attempted to make blini, but it didn't turn out very well. I first tried to use my griddle, but the batter was so thin that it just spread too much. When I tried a pan, they burned or fell apart when I tried to flip them. We ended up getting enough for a taste test. Colin first said they weren't good, but then he continued eating and decided it was okay. Caleigh only touched it to her tongue, but she decided they bad.

My husband went to a Russian market for me to look for plain nesting dolls that I found online after it was too late to order for this week. They said they only have them around Christmas so we didn't get any, but he did bring back this box of candy he found there.

So far they've only tried this one piece that looks like a little cone, but they all liked it and are looking forward to trying the rest.

Since we weren't able to get the other nesting dolls, we made these from cardstock. The templates came from here.

Colin's nesting dolls

Caleigh's nesting dolls

This is Molly's. She was feeling a little lazy that day so she only wanted to color the biggest doll.

This is what they look like when they're all nested inside the largest one.

Here are their notebook pages. They did books for a map to locate Russia, the flag, landmarks, Matryoshka dolls, a wheel to show things Russia is known for, the religion, and onion shaped domes.

For our books and other ideas, I used the following:
Russia Lapbook
The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship Unit Study
Another Celebrated Dancing Bear lapbook pieces