Another Celebrated Dancing Bear

Written by Gladys Scheffrin-Falk and Illustrated by Barbara Garrison

Key Scripture:
1 Corinthians 13:4-8a (NIV) "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

This book about true friendship took us on our first FIAR adventure outside of the United States. Max, the original "celebrated dancing bear", demonstrates qualities of biblical love and creatively helps his friend Boris to overcome envy by investing time and energy in teaching Boris to dance, while also encouraging him to see the value in his current occupation. In the end, the Moscow Circus is graced by two "celebrated dancing bears."

As we took our first "trip" out of the United States, we talked about Psalm 113:4 "The Lord is high above all nations." We looked at Russia and saw how it spans two continents, Europe and Asia. We placed our story disc in the European (Western) portion of Russia because the story is centered in Moscow. For our geography envelopes, we divided the map of Europe into two portions, European and Asian. We talked about how the European portion is smaller in size than the Asian portion, but that it is larger in population. This tied in beautifully with our MMM lessons for the week which focused on greater than and less than.

The children delighted in acting out this story. When we first began acting it out, they were having so much fun that they decided that they wanted to present it to Daddy later in the week for his birthday. To tie in with this birthday idea, we read Ask Mr. Bear, one of the Before FIAR titles that deals with a young boy's desire to give his mother something special for her birthday. They raced back and forth to their box of toy dishes collecting the appropriate "props." We used a bear coloring page as the basis for Claire to make a "Celebrated Dancing Bear" poster like the one that hung on Max' wall in the story. We hung it and one of our "Russian Skyline" pictures as backdrops for our "drama." Acting out the entire story took a good bit of prompting, but I think Daddy enjoyed his birthday present!

We watched The Nutcracker and a couple of scenes from Fiddler on the Roof and compared the versions of Russian Dancing that we saw. We listened to quite a bit of Tchaikosvsky during our time with this book, sometimes in the background for our artwork and sometimes with the kids dancing enthusiastically themselves. One of our art projects for this book was to make our own version of Matrioshka (stacking dolls) using fabric, clip art images of bears, and various nesting containers. (Check out this link if you'd like to see our Matrioshka bears.) This was a special tie-in for Claire as she has really enjoyed the Matiroshka activity that is a part of her Jumpstart Kindergarten game.

We learned a little about boiling and freezing by comparing the spread of food coloring through boiling water vs. freezing temperature water. This was a wonderful way to visualize the difference between molecules moving fast and slow, and we practiced performing various actions both slowly and quickly, while also reviewing left and right.

A second applied math lesson involved learning more about the clock and telling time. We found a beautifully illustrated book called The Book of the Clock by Margaret Tarrant that was a wonderful resource for this topic. Another favorite supplemental book was Annie - Anya; A Month in Moscow, another precious story about friendship that also reinforced much of what we had learned about Russian culture.