Polar Express

This has been building up with anticipation since December 1st when we started traveling around the world. Each day we got a stamp in our passport, traveled to a new place where we learned about how they celebrate the holiday season, did the Santa dance to get home, and now the polar express is our last stop in our travels to get to the North Pole.
We will watch the movie (we read the story yesterday), eat popcorn, drink hot chocolate, take home our suit cases and passports to remember all our travels, get a golden ticket, and a bell from Santa's sleigh (I wrote to Santa to hopefully get a bell to remember to Believe).
(I forgot to take pictures of just the room-sorry bad teacher-see old posts for what the room looked like on blog)

1 more stop on our travels....Sweden

We have one final stop before the polar express picks us up to take us to the north pole.
We visited Sweden today and learned:
-the celebrate St. Lucia's day which is celebrated on December 13th
-December 13th is also the winter solstice which is the shortest day of the year
-we talked about how on December 19th (today's date) that St. Lucia's day would have been in the past (it already happened), and what a short day would feel like
-children were white dresses, red sashes, and a crown made of candles

We made our crown of candles to celebrate St. Lucia's day in Sweden:

All sorts of sorting

We have been practicing learning our colors, matching colors, and sorting by attributes and categories.

Off to Russia

Our second to last stop was in Russia. We learned many new things about how they celebrate Christmas!
In Russia:
-Christmas is celebrated on January 7th

-The Russian Christmas tree is called a Yelka

-Babushka delivers presents to Russian children

-The Nutcracker Ballet came from Russia

We celebrated our time in Russia by creating a Nutcracker doll ourselves!

Celebrating in India

We traveled to India where we learned all about their bright and colorful festivals!
We learned about:
-three different festivals called Dwali, Holi, Eid
-the festivals are bright colors, streamers, and lights
-they decorate with poinsettas (which we made the connection back to our travels to Mexico)
-Hena tattoos are very popular

We created our own hena tattoos in order to remember our travels to India: