Another Celebrated Dancing Bear {FIAR}

We rowed Another Celebrated Dancing Bear by Gladys Scheffrin-Falk in March.

This was one of the few books I purchased since it was unavailable from our library.

I generally don't buy books I'm unfamiliar with but really wanted to do all the FIAR Volume 1 books.

In the end, I was very pleased with this story and thankful that we have it for 'keeps'!

Social Studies:

Piper colored the Russian flag and we found Russia on the map.

We also perused through some books on Russia and learned to count to ten in Russian.

We had our own tea time, just like the bears, and discussed friendship.

We took note of how Max responds to his friend's jealousy with kindness and even sacrifice.

We talked about ways we can be a good friend.

Language Arts:

We talked about occupations.

We thought about what Boris and Max's occupations would have entailed (Boris worked at a hospital, Max was a performer in a circus.)

The girls drew pictures of what they want to be when they grow up.

We did a lesson on characterization (that I found here).

For each character the girls answered what the character looked like, what the character did in the story and how the others reacted to the character.

Art/Math:

Finally, Piper colored a set of printable matryoshka dolls.

We used these as a means of talking about categorizing things by their size - small, medium, large.

We read the story The Wooden Doll by Susan Bonners, too.

I randomly came across it at the library and picked it up since it featured matryoshka dolls.

It refers to Poland rather than Russia but it didn't really matter because the girls were completely enamored with the story and the dolls!

I plan to find them some matryoshka dolls of their own for birthdays or Christmas!