Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty  with the Busy Bees was anything but something that you might snooze through.  It was such a hoot!  Since I had already shared with them The Nutcracker back in December, we reviewed a little about Tchaikovsky, orchestras and ballet.  I taught them a few ballet steps-- releve, plie and jete.  We discussed that boys can participate in ballets too!  I told them about how strong males were in ballet. We found Russia again on the globe.

We also discussed who authors are and how Sleeping Beauty was written by the Brothers Grimm. We discussed how people have taken that story and written it themselves into different versions of the story.  We looked at several different copies of this book from the library, noticing what was the same and different.  

We also talked about what a character is and identified the ones in Sleeping Beauty.  Then we headed off to the table to color and cut character puppets from the story.  (This is shown in the first picture below, after the videos). Afterwards for math, we put numbers on the back of the puppets and discussed ordinals.  This way the kiddos could take their puppets home and know which came first, second, third and fourth in retelling the story in a puppet show.   

While the kids we were working at the table, they had the funniest conversation! It started with Noah and Sydney saying they wanted to be paleontologists when they grew up.  At which point Syd chimed in that she was going to be a paleontologist AND a mom. Noah, not to be outdone, then announced that he was also going to be a dad of 90-20 kids! Calli pipes up that she is going to be a missionary. Paige says she is going to be a mom. Ryder says he wants to be a basketball player.  Lincoln says he doesn't know. I say, fair enough. :)

On Wednesday, it was showtime! Below is our very own Sleeping Beauty production. Props were child-made-- the boys cut and glued together swords and the girls cut and glued together flowers.

Math (pictured above)... Aurora sleeps for 100 years in the story. We made 100 by each child counting out 10 bears and making a group of 10. (I did the extras to equal 100). Then we made 10 groups of 10 to show what 100 is. We wrote the number 10 on a post it note by each group.

Art (shown below)... Tchaikovsky painting.

The kiddos working on their props for our ballet/play!