Christmas in Russia Lesson Plans

Russia had quite a few years during which Christmas was forbidden, but the Russian Christmas has still had a profound influence on our celebration of Christmas in America, and it has some great teaching points. Study math, geography, literature, and art with our Christmas in Russia lesson plans.

Books for this study:

• Christmas in Russia
• The Tale of Baboushka
• Babushka
• Baboushka and the Three Kings
• The Miracle of St. Nicholas
• The Miraculous Child: a Folktale from Old Russia

• Mary Engelbreit’s Nutcracker has none of the darkness of the original.
• The Nutcracker by Susan Jeffers is a pretty, traditional retelling.
• The Story of the Nutcracker Ballet by Diane Goode, a small and simple telling of the story.
• Alison Jay’s version takes place in a snow globe.
• The Pacific Northwest Ballet Presents the Nutcracker is about the ballet in particular, with photos from the production using Maurice Sendak’s wonderful sets.
• Nutcracker Ballet Coloring Book
• The Berenstain Bears and the Nutcracker

Christmas in Ghana Lesson Plans

Christmas in Ghana is a religious holiday, and also a joyful harvest celebration, since it happens when the cocoa harvest comes in. People go to visit their friends and the week before Christmas is filled with revelry. On Christmas Eve, kids have a nativity play while drummers and singers provide music for dancing. The celebrations often begin in churches, but there are processions through the streets, and dancing in the streets all night. This festive custom may go on from December 20th until New Year’s.

Ghana is the second largest producer of cocoa in the world, and the December cocoa harvest provides important income for the people of Ghana, so this is a good time to study chocolate. Our Chocolate Lesson Plans include geography, history, and economics.

The Night Before Christmas, illustrated by Rachel Isadora, features Santa in Kente cloth, a traditional type of fabric from Ghana. Kente cloth is woven in long strips, and then the strips are sewn together to create fabric. Look at pictures of Kente cloth for inspiration, using the book or the video below, and then have students create their own geometric patterns on sentence strips.

[youtube 08n-kxPFHVA]

Kente cloth weaving is an art form, but new clothing is also an important part of Christmas celebrations in Ghana. Everyone receives new clothes as a gift at Christmas. Many U.S. families also have clothing traditions, ranging from new outfits for Christmas card pictures to new pajamas for Christmas Eve. Have students share any new clothing traditions they have for Christmas, and graph them.

The Christmas feast in Ghana usually includes a stew with chicken or goat meat and rice, plus fufu, a dish made with yams, cassava, plantains, or other starchy foods. Our Plant Lesson Plans include a tops and bottoms worksheet for sorting plants into those that provide food in the roots and those that provide food above the ground. Many students may be unfamiliar with cassava, plantains, and even with yams, so bringing some in to experience can be an interesting element of the lesson. Ask the lunch ladies to bake them for you, or cut chunks and microwave them. As the video below shows, fufu is not much like an American sweet potato casserole.

[youtube 5HFhruMRfcM]

GeographyGeek has a nice set of photos of Ghana to download. Show these to students, find Ghana on the map, and notice that Ghana is near the Equator. If you’re studying Christmas Around the World, compare holiday celebrations in Northern climes like Sweden,  Southern Hemisphere nations like South Africa , and equatorial nations like Ghana. How does the climate affect the celebrations?

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas

The Hoboken Chicken Emergency Activities

The Hoboken Chicken Emergency by Daniel and Jill Pinkwater is a fun Thanksgiving book that your students might have seen as a TV special. It makes a terrific read aloud for elementary through middle school, with grades 3-4 as the epicenter, if you will, of enjoyment.

Arthur Bobowicz is sent out to get his family’s Thanksgiving turkey, but ends up with a live, 266 pound chicken bred by a mad scientist called Professor Mazzocchi. It’s the sort of thing that might happen to anyone, but it leads to complications. Arthur keeps the chicken as a pet, names her Henrietta, and trains her, as you can see in the video clip above. When Henrietta proves to be an inconvenient pet and has to be returned to Professor Mazzocchi, she ends up loose on the streets, scaring people in scenes reminiscent of Godzilla or King Kong. Arthur accepts the situation until the town hires a chicken hunter who sets a trap for Henrietta. When the trap fails, Professor Mazzocchi reenters the story and kicks off a “Love Henrietta” campaign to tame the chicken and endear her to the town. The campaign is successful, and by Christmas Henrietta is back with Arthur as his pet.

Read the story. There are 14 chapters, but some are very short, so this could be a daily after-lunch reading for two weeks. As you enjoy the story, try out some of these activities and discussion questions:

• Arthur lives in an urban neighborhood with lots of immigrants and some interesting shops. Compare Arthur’s shopping experience to your students’ experiences of grocery shopping. Do they visit special markets like the Indian spice shop Arthur visits? If you’re studying immigration as part of your Thanksgiving lessons, this is a nice connection.
• Hoboken is a real town. Visit Hoboken’s website to get a sense of the place.
• The family ends up eating meatloaf for Thanksgiving dinner, since Arthur wasn’t able to acquire a turkey. As it happens, the family doesn’t really like turkey, but they always have it for Thanksgiving because it’s traditional. Discuss students’ Thanksgiving traditions, and check out our Food Traditions lesson plans for related activities.
• In chapter 4, Professor Mazzocchi explains how he breeds rectangular goldfish. Use the process to practice writing step by step directions or making flowcharts.
• Professor Mazzocchi also explains that “Fish do not like to think about things they don’t understand.” Is this true of people? We’ve found that some people like ti and others say it makes their heads feel as though they’re about to explode. This is a nice question for a reflective essay.
• In chapter 6, Arthur nearly catches Henrietta, but he is in a place where he is forbidden to go, and his father finds him. Arthur doesn’t ask his father to help him get Henrietta, for fear of getting into trouble and because he’s already sure that his father won’t help. Discuss other choices Aurthur might have made.
• Arthur has to go on a family visit during the Thanksgiving break, and when he comes back, the situation has gone from being a tough break for Henrietta to being an emergency for the town of Hoboken. Discuss with students what constitutes an emergency, and what plans and systems are in place for emergencies in your classroom, school, and town.
• Henrietta is one 266-pound chicken standing six feet tall, but soon news reports are announcing that witnesses have seen lots of 1,o0o pound chickens standing 15 feet tall. Two things are going on here. First, rumors grow as they spread. Second, people in general are terrible at estimating sizes. Experiment with this by choosing a pet or stuffed animal and measuring its height and weight accurately. Take a photo and print out copies for each student. Have students interview five people each and get their estimates of the size of the creature. Graph your results.
• This book was written in 1977. The rumor about the chicken spreads by radio in chapter 7. How would it spread today? Have students create a script for the medium they choose: perhaps a succession of Tweets or Facebook updates or TV news flashes.
• The town hires a Chicken Hunter whose web address is badfowl.com. Have students use information from the book to create a homepage for www.badfowl.com, the website of Anthony DePalma, Chicken Hunter. Students can do this on paper or in your class’s graphics program, but it would also be an excellent opportunity to learn some new tech skills by building a webpage.  Read our series on A Better Classroom Website in a Week for tips.
• Arthur tries to find Henrietta himself over the Thanksgiving break without getting help. The police and the chicken hunter try to track her down and capture her, without success. Then the whole town gets involved in the “Love Henrietta” campaign, with positive results. Have students identify the steps of the campaign, and discuss why it worked. Have students brainstorm other possible solutions to the problem.

The Time Machine Lesson Plans

The idea of traveling through time has fascinated people for centuries. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells continues to be a popular example of science fiction and fantasy dealing with this possibility.You can read it online.

In this book, a time traveler from 1985 goes into the very distant future and finds what initially seems to be a utopia, the land of the Eloi. The disappearance of his time machine leads The Time Traveler to discover the Morlocks, whose work makes the ease and pleasure of life possible for the Eloi. In another twist, The Time Traveler learns that the Eloi are not the masters of the Morlock slaves, but the livestock on which they feed.

Before reading, discuss with students other time travel fiction they might have experienced, such as books from Time Warp Trio or Magic Tree House series or the movie Back to the Future. Recall the methods for time travel used in any books or movies students know about. Time machines are fairly rare in recent speculative fiction.

 

Online Resources

• A Penguin Factsheet for the book
• James Van Pelt’s quizzes and discussion questions
• Crayola suggests creating a timeline with sidewalk chalk and traveling through time with movement and discussion.
• Build a time machine from recyclables.
• Any serious discussion of time travel has to include the theory of relativity and  Einstein’s space traveling twins (I think it’s a law). Introduce the concept with a Shockwave game.
• Check out retrofuture, the  ideas people in the past had about our present, which was their future.

Science

• Time travel is a serious possibility to some physicists. Check the idea out on YouTube:

• Time Magazine has a more in-depth video on time travel narrated by comedian Brian Malow, with film clips. Review it before you show it to your class — it may not be appropriate for your classroom.
• An article on the subject from The Daily Mail will clarify some of the scientific points and paradoxes for older students.
• The future world visited by The Time Traveler has two kinds of humanoids, which have evolved from the upper and lower classes. The theory of evolution was fairly new when this book was written. If you study evolution in your science classes, discuss the processes which could lead to two distinct species of humans.
• A theme in the book which is related to the theory of evolution is the degeneration of humanity and of the world. The theory of evolution doesn’t actually hold that organisms keep getting better and better or that they get worse, though people sometimes talk about it in those terms. The Time Traveler thinks that a lack of danger and hardship has caused people to become weak. Discuss and have students write a response to this idea.

Social Studies

• This is the perfect time for the classic dinner party question: If you could have a dinner party with eight guests from any time in the past, whom would you invite? Have groups of students create such a dinner party, with each student researching one of the guests. Groups can write up scripts for a dinner table conversation among the guests and present it to the class.
• Another way to bring drama and research into the study is to have each student study a period in history which they find intriguing, and then report to the class as time travelers who have just returned from a visit.
• The Time Traveler visits a society in which advancing technology has made life so easy that there is no longer any advantage to being smart or hard working. Since the book was written in 1895, technology has advanced significantly, and our lives are in many ways easier. We haven’t quit working, though. Have students discuss and then write about the consequences of increasingly advanced technology and easier lives.
• Wells sees serious consequences from the gap between the haves and the have nots which was very evident in his day. Have things improved? See an article from the New York Times on global wealth distribution and a chart-rich discussion of U.S. wealth inequality from a University of California sociologist. Set aside plenty of time to analyze and understand the charts — it’s a great visual literacy lesson as well as a good way to apply math skills. Once students have digested the data, discuss whether this is a problem, as Wells believed.
• The Time Traveler muses on adaptation and evolution, thinking of how in 1985 physical courage was becoming less important than it previously had been. Family feeling, he though, would become unimportant in the future, and he figured he was seeing the end of intelligence and creativity in the Eloi. Compare the culture of Victorian England, our modern time, and the Eloi to determine whether there is a continuum, as The Time Traveler expected.

Lesson Plans for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island and many more great stories, as well as some of the most popular children’s poetry.

Dr. Henry Jekyll is a good, well-respected man. Mr. Hyde is a monster — in the opening scenes of the book we learn that he trampled a little girl with complete unconcern, and later he commits a murder. And yet Mr. Hyde is actually Dr. Jekyll. Jekyll has learned to make a potion that allows his worse side to become a separate creature — Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll continues to be a good doctor, but as Mr. Hyde he can do all the wicked things he wants to do. As Mr. Hyde’s behavior becomes worse, Dr. Jekyll tries to stop turning himself into Hyde. However, in the end he changes into Mr. Hyde without even taking the potion. Instead, he must take the antidote to return to his life as Dr. Jekyll. He is unable to get the special ingredients for the antidote and unable to stop turning into Mr. Hyde, so he writes out a confession of all that has happened, leaves poison ready on the table for Mr. Hyde, and waits. His friends find Mr. Hyde dead and read Dr. Jekyll’s confession with astonishment — and that is the end of the book.

There are so many good online resources for this classic that we wouldn’t take the time to create quizzes or handouts ourselves — scroll down for the links. However, we do have some cross-curricular hands-on ideas for you.

English

• The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde begins with Mr. Utterson, who is usually left out of movies and retellings of the story, but whose search for the truth about his friend Dr. Jekyll takes up most of the book. The story of Frankenstein begins with Captain Walton, again just a bystander. This device of having an unimportant character lead gently into the story was popular in the 19th century. Ask students to look for other examples of this literary device, and then to think of other literary devices. For example, novels now sometimes begin with a series of emails, while books in the 20th century and earlier sometimes began with letters. Have students identify a literary device and illustrate it, creating a class bulletin board.
• Dr. Jekyll believed, as he says in Chapter 3, that he could control Mr. Hyde and be rid of him at any time. He was wrong: Mr. Hyde became more powerful than Dr. Jekyll and destroyed him. This is another similarity with Frankenstein, but it could also be said of drug use or of a bad habit like gossiping or even of unwise friendships. Ask students to write a fictional or factual account of someone’s struggle with something they thought they could easily give up — but could not.
• Use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast Frankenstein with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
• Read Write Think has a lesson plan with nice printables that has students create a storyboard for a transformation scene showing Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde. I’ve had very good results with using video and other multimedia in writing classes. If you haven’t tried it, this is a well-organized lesson that will make an easy starting point.

Science

• Dr. Jekyll decides not to share his method of creating the potion that divided his good self from his evil self. This is probably because such a potion is impossible. Nowadays, we tend to think of potions in terms of magic potions created by Harry Potter and his classmates, but Stevenson was writing at a time when potions, tonics, and tinctures were taken seriously. Have students research salts (a major part of Jekyll’s potion) to determine what the potion might have included. Ask students to create recipes, giving points for plausibility and creativity, as well as for evidence of research.
• Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis and was treated with a drug derived from ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus. Read an article on Stevenson’s experience. The writer argues that Stevenson used his experiences with this drug to develop the idea of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. See whether students agree, and then challenge them to research the effect of drugs on personality and behavior. Does their new knowledge change their opinions?
• It has been suggested that Dr. Jekyll represents the left hemisphere of the brain, which is rational and rule-governed, while Mr. Hyde is a right brain creation,with the disorderliness and originality of the right hemisphere. Does this imply that the left brain is good and the right brain evil? Have students learn more about the right and left hemispheres (resources are linked at our Brains Lesson Plans page) and draw infographics showing the characteristics that might give someone this idea.

Online resources

• Glencoe has an excellent teaching unit for the book with a lot of historical background.
• Penguin also has a teaching guide with comprehension questions for each chapter.
• SparkNotes has summaries, discussion questions, and a quiz.

Next Page »