Camilla and Roman: Treasure Chest and Precious Stones from the Fairytales

Easy art for toddlers and preschool. Treasure chest: tempera paint over school glue with a toothpick, glitter glue. Magic flower (stack and count DIY toy): dot stickers, self-adhesive jewels, construction paper.

We are busy exploring the wonderful Russian culture hands-on. More posts are coming!
Tuesday, June 17 Russia - Korea Republic
Link to the post: Cupcake Castle: Play-doh and Scissors Skills
Sunday, June 22 Russia - Belgium
Thursday, June 26 Russia - Algeria
You can read more about it here: World Cup for Kids

This post is a part of cultural hands-on activities for the World Cup for Kids project. Every day a team plays a game in the World Cup, there will be a blog post on kids activities related to some aspect of the culture of the country of the day. World Cup 2014 started on June 12 in Brazil. The participating countries: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Cameroon, Chili, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Honduras, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea Republic, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Uruguay, USA.

Make sure to follow World Cup for Kids on Our Main page and Pinterest.

Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals

Some geography of Russia: Ural Mountain, or The Urals extend about 1600 miles from North to South through Russia dividing the country into European and Asian parts. The actual boundary is the eastern side of The Urals. The mountains are unusually high for their old age (250-300 million years old).

Precious and semi-precious stones (emerald, amethyst, malachite, diamond, and many others), as well as gas, oil, coal, and gold, are the reason The Urals are called a Russian treasure box. Faberge made his eggs using the beautiful minerals from Ural Mountains.

"A Russian man can't live without a rainbow," said Pavel Bazhov who studied legends and wisdom of the people of The Urals and later wrote a book of fairy tales. I found it in English in Amazon (surprisingly) - Malachite Casket . In his intriguing and rather dark stories, Bazhov described the hard working miners and their families, the beautiful nature of the mountains, the joy of creative arts and crafts of the local masters. The tales are among the favorite in the reading lists of Russian kids for many years.

The treasure chest

We decorated our own treasure chest as a Father's Day gift. The idea was to try to imitate Malachite, a beautiful green mineral from the Urals.

We used white school glue as a base. I added drops of green, blue, white, black tempera paints and gave Camilla a tooth pick to mix them. She loved this activity!

When she finally got bored with mixing we added spots of glitter glue on top of the mix. So she got excited again to mix that in. Adding glitter glue would never stop. I had to take the tubes away from her because the beautiful concoction started oozing from all the sides of the boxes. It took forever to dry, but the result is almost as good as the famous masterpieces (almost!).

Magic flower (stack and count DIY toy)

I cut out flowers from construction paper with different amount of petals (1-5), folded the petals up and bend them outward with the pencil. The number of petals is written in the center of each flower.

Camilla put sticker dots onto each petal (one-to-one correspondence), counted the petals, and arrange the parts into one flower according to the number in the center.