Year 3: Exploring Countries and Cultures, Zdrah-stu-it-eh Russia!

     We made our way to Russia!  My post title is the phonetic pronunciation of the formal way to say "Hello" in Russia.  It actually looks like this:  Здравствуйте. Nifty, yes? The pronunciation can be found here.
  No trip through Russia would be complete without reading about the Romanovs:

     I found this book through an author event over at Amongst Lovely Things.  Originally, I began reading it aloud to them but found it on CD so opted to give my voice some rest and let someone else do the reading.  Now, this is a pretty intense book, written for grades 7 and up and ages 12 and up, and some of the details are very graphic.  I knew my daughter would be able to handle it, but please pre-read it if you are going to use this as a read-aloud and there are young ones in your brood.  Otherwise, let the older ones read it for themselves.  It's such a sad and tragic story and the kids would go from being exasperated with the Romanvs to having pity for them.  It was a very well written book.

     Moving along with our trip, I gave the kids an art project that I found on Pinterest (Good ol' Pinterest!)  They had to recreate St. Basil's Cathedral:

     My daughter happened to be cold and chose to wear her jacket while working on her project.  How apropos for Russia!

     These were going into a notebook for the kids so in order to make it fit I had them create a picture of the cathedral at night  (against black paper) and during the day (against blue paper).  This took a lot of work and had to be completed over the course of the week.  There was a lot of coloring, then a lot of cutting and finally a lot of positioning and gluing.  The end result turned out great.

     This is my son's finished work:

     Here is my daughter's:

     Aren't they so colorful?  I showed them pictures of the actual cathedral online to help them determine how to color them.

     We're almost done.  Just a few more weeks and our third year of homeschooling is done!