3 Russian Crafts for Kids

In our Five In a Row co-op this week we read the book Another Celebrated Dancing Bear which takes place in Imperial Russia.  I believe this is the first book we've read with that setting; so I was pretty excited to see what kinds of crafts I could find to illustrate Russian culture.

1.  Printable nesting dolls.   I love these adorable Russian nesting dolls.  You can print them out in full color or in black and white outline to color them yourself.

2.  Faberge eggs.  I am honestly shocked that I have been unable to find any children's nonfiction books containing the story of the Fabrege eggs. Their history is all about riches, surprises and lost treasure- just the kind of thing kids love, and such a great way to teach about Imperial Russian and the 1917 Revolution.  If you want to tell your children the story and show them a few pictures, this link from PBS has a pretty good summary.

We used a really fun silk technique to dye the eggs.  They don't actually look all that similar to the historical Faberge eggs, but they're fancy- which is basically what we were going for.  I'll be writing about how to make them in an upcoming post.

3.  Russian Architecture-  The colorful onion domes on the Orthodox churches in Russia are so striking. I thought it would be fun to let the kids design their own churches in this style.

My husband (who has a much steadier artistic hand and loads more patience for historical accuracy) sketched some historically accurate domes and spires for me on a piece of card stock.  I used those as templates for cutting out lots of domes and spires from different colors of construction paper, along with some other basic shapes.  The kids could then arrange them like building blocks on their page and glue them on once they found an arrangement they liked.  They used markers to draw on details like windows, stripes on the domes, and crosses.

Any other ideas for Russian kids' crafts?