Passport Club - Russia

Once a month we meet for a geography focused co-op with a few other families.  Each month we study a new country and the mom hosting the co-op that month does activities and serves food from that country.  October's country was Russia.  At home, we usually lead up to the co-op day by doing activities of our own, such as learning about famous people from the country, doing art related to the country, and reading lots and lots of books.

Russia:

We found Russia on our Montessori map and traced it.  Next we labeled the Volga River, Moscow, Siberia, the Ural Mountains, and Lake Baikal.  We learned about tundra, steppe, and taiga.

We read lots of books set in Russia and a couple of factual books about Russia.  We definitely prefer to learn about countries and culture via living books.

Bear wrote and acrostic poem using the word Russia, but I couldn't find the photo of it.

We learned about famous Russians like Tchaikovsky, Wassily Kandinsky (although, it wasn't their first exposure to either of these people), Peter the Great, and even Saint Nicholas.

We read a plethora of books:

 Annie,,,Anya was one of our favorites.

 We did three art projects: Matryoshka paintings, Onion dome chalk pastels, and Kandinsky circle trees.

 J-jo's

Bear's

Both kids wrote and practiced a presentation for our Passport Club co-op day.

Bear's was on Peter the Great and J-jo's was on the Monk Seal.  They watched this video on monk seal behavior.

We drew brown bears from Draw Write Now.

I printed out some things for us to cut and color for our Passport Club scrapbooks.  These started off as lapbooks, but the purchase of a Proclick has morphed our lapbooks into scrapbooks.


Inspiration:
Matryoshka art
Kandinsky Trees
Russian info (narrative)
National Geographic for Kids
Time for Kids
Information about Faberge Eggs (and printable eggs to color)