PJ Day: Another Celebrated Dancing Bear (FI♥AR)

FI♥AR- Another Celebrated Dancing Bear by Gladys Scheffrin-Falk

January 7-11, 2013

Another Celebrated Dancing Bear 20th Anniv Ed

"A cute story by Gladys Scheffrin-Falk about two bears who are friends in Russia. One dances for the Moscow Circus and one works at the hospital. The one at the hospital is jealous of the dancing bear, but the dancing bear begins to give him lessons and soon they both enjoy twirling around and dancing. Intricate etchings illustrate the story on every page"Rainbow Resources

Monday: social studies & Math

We started out new FIAR book Another Celebrated Dancing Bear on Monday. It’s origin is Russia so we found Russia on our map and placed our sticker. Since this was the first book be rowed that talked about Russia, we had lots of fun things we got to cover. We played with our Matryoshka dolls (nesting dolls) and watched a video showing a neat Russian dance. The girls thought it looked fun so they tried out their dancing skills. They had so much fun with this dance, they asked to watch it again. I can see if I let them try to Russian dance every day it would prove to be a great P.E. activity. It definitely requires a lot of work.

In the book it talked about time so we took some time and watched a video on telling time and filled out a worksheet. Fluttershy is just starting to understand that time means something. She did well with telling time to the hour. Our day ended with a cute bear snack made with cinnamon bread, bananas, and raisins.

Math:Acting out story problems using pennies.

Tuesday: art

Art day is always a fun one. For art we dyed eggs (for pysanky eggs) with silk ties. Although the girls lost interest early in this activity, I did find it fun. I think it was just a little too much work for them. It would be a great activity for someone a bit older.

First, we had to take a trip to the Deseret Industries to pick out the ugliest 100% silk ties they had. The ugly ones seemed to be the brightest colored and weirdest patterns.

Next we cut the fabric in 1” x 8” strips. You take 3 fabric strips and wrap the egg tightly and tie it with string.

Then wrap a piece of white fabric around the wrapped egg and tie a string holding it on tight.

Place in pan with water that just covers the eggs. Add 3 Tbsp vinegar.

Boil for 20-30 minutes. (the longer the darker the eggs will die)

Let eggs cool and carefully unwrap.

Our eggs turned out neat. We learned that you need a really dark colors to get the best effects.

We also made circus finger puppets and watch some circus videos with bears. I thought we should briefly talk about the humane treatment of animals before we watched the videos. As I was searching for videos I found some that I chose not to show to the girls because I didn’t think the bears were enjoying what they were made to do. The video I chose may have had bears wearing outfits, but they the bears seemed to enjoy what they were doing.

Math: Identifying time to the hour.

Wednesday: Science & Language arts

Hospitable Max sets the samovar to boil. For science we briefly talked about boiling water and made ourselves a cut of herbal tea to enjoy while we watched Disney’s Peter and the Wolf. The music for Peter and the Wolf was written by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. Later in the day we also watched several PBS circus physics videos. We watched Luciano and his puppies jump, slide, and wrestle according to Newton’s Laws of Motion, Jugglers know that if you throw a ball into the air it will follow a curved path by projectile motion, Flyers on the platform trapeze use conservation of momentum to launch themselves across the ring, Trick riders depend on horses that can run in circles without getting tired because of Centripetal Acceleration, and What does the trapeze have in common with a grandfather clock? Pendulum Motion. These sound really complicated, but the videos were neat. They really enjoyed watching the dogs sliding down the slides backwards.

For Language arts we played Russian bingo. Even Rarity enjoyed saying these new and interesting words. When each card was picked she promptly repeated every work I said. Some of the cards were Peter Tchaikovsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Grandfather Frost (Russia’s version of Santa clause), Onion Domes, and Czar. Each card had a picture to help them visualize what they were. Bingo was a hit with Fluttershy as well. She has asked to play it every day since.

Math: Identifying ordinal position to forth.

Thursday: Tot school

While Futtershy was playing with friends at preschool, Rarity did a fun tot school circus pack from totally tots. She practiced cutting with scissors, coloring, tracing, counting, and fine motor skills.

Friday:

Was our extra day. We were supposed to go to dance class, but after shoveling a path to the car I was cold and went and didn't have the desire to drive in the wet stuff so we played outside. After about 5 1/2 minutes, Rarity was done so we went inside and watched Dumbo while we had a tea party. The night before I made Russian tea cakes to have with our planned tea party. They were super yummy.