Preschool: Another Celebrated Dancing Bear

For the last couple weeks of preschool, we have been studying "Another Celebrated Dancing Bear." It's about two bears in Russia. One is a dancer and the other wants to be so his friend teaches him. We learned about Russian geography and culture, looked at Russian architecture, listened to Russian music and watched Russian ballet. We talked about what an occupation is and what occupations they might like to have when they are older. We talked about hospitality and what it means to be a good friend. They acted out lots of words from the book, like "bowing" and "kicking." They cut out and glued the hours on a clock.

One of my favorite activities was when we learned about the states of matter by examining water as ice, liquid and steam--what happens when we pour it and how does it feel. We did an experiment where we put ice in different locations and then monitored how quickly it melted. Their hypothesis was that the ice on the counter would melt the fastest, then the one outside, then the one in the fridge and the ice in the freezer would melt the slowest. They were correct on all counts and had a lot of fun running to check on their ice at set intervals. The ice in water on the counter melted completely in under 30 minutes, the one on the counter on a plate melted in 2 hours. It took quite a bit longer for the one outside to completely melt as it was a fairly cold day. We didn't see any melting of the ice in the fridge until 8 hours, and even then it was very little (no wonder it takes so long for things to defrost in the fridge!). The ice in the freezer......well, it didn't melt one bit! Even a week later it was still just as much the same size as before. Maybe that's why we put water in the freezer to turn it into ice!

Megan and Matthew with states of matter.

With the ice cube that was outside. Matthew insisted on putting this under his bike wheel. Every time we checked on it, he spun the wheel to create a fan.

Close up of the ice--melting some, but still a lot of ice left.