Russian Winter Festival

We traveled to Moscow to attend their Winter Festival. They are held in many cities in Russia every year from mid-December to mid-January. We celebrated winter with some traditional Russian culture.

Ice sculptures fill the streets in celebration of winter. We used food coloring to paint different sizes and shapes of ice. 

We read a Russian folktale, The Snow Child,

by Freya Littledale,

We talked about why the snow child had to leave in the warmth of spring but came back in the cold of winter.

Since we have no real snow with which to experiment with, we used a snow cone machine to make snow. We saw how the snow melted quickly in the warmth of the room, but stayed frozen in the freezer. We  even made snow cones to eat with the snow we made.

Our favorite activity of the week was playing with matryoshkas- Russian nesting dolls- a popular Russian symbol. We read a charming folktale from Russia called, The Littlest Matryoshka. 

  Matryoshkas make a great manipulative for small children and provided us with lots of imaginary play. The "littlest ones" were definitely our favorites!

Ice skating is a popular winter sport in Russia.

After reading The Nutcracker Ballet, 

we listened, danced and ice skated to Tchaikovsky’s famous “Nutcracker” Ballet. We loved falling down!

We also used colored ice cubes to “ice skate” around and around on paper to create some beautiful, colorful masterpieces.

 

  

A huge sheet of ice provided us with a rink of real ice where we created play scenarios. 

Another familiar Russian story is Peter and the Wolf. We watched and listened to the story which uses different musical instruments to represent each character in the story.  

We used paint and a variety of painting tools to represent the characters.  

What a fun way to celebrate winter!