homework in preschool

by Little Sunshine's Playhouse and Preschool

Should Preschoolers Have Homework?

There are some topics that society has deemed controversial in almost every scenario — politics, religion, income levels, whether Taylor Swift is the greatest artist of our time. But for parents, there’s one more topic that can be safely added to the list: homework. There is a big argument among parents, researchers, and educators on whether or not homework is beneficial or unnecessary. Should preschoolers have homework? Are there benefits? Does it make them “competitive” as students?

This article looks at both sides of the argument, but explains why the educators at Little Sunshine’s Preschool decide not to assign homework to preschoolers and those in our pre-K program.

Arguments for Giving Homework to Preschoolers

For context, preschools who assign homework aren’t sending home textbooks and asking for written essays.

For the sake of this article, “homework” and “worksheets” are synonymous. And there wouldn’t be an argument over preschool homework if there weren’t some perceived benefits to worksheets. Here are the reasons some parents and educators are saying preschool homework is important.

Skill Reinforcement: Those who champion preschool homework say it helps reinforce the skills and concepts children learn in school and gives them additional practice that helps solidify their learning.
Preparation for Elementary/Middle/High School: Many parents consider the long game when it comes to their children’s education. Homework is often seen as something that prepares kids for what will be expected of them in the future when take-home work becomes more common.
Parental Involvement: Homework counts as together time … right? It certainly provides parents with a chance to engage with their children and offer support and guidance when it comes to their education.

Arguments Against Giving Homework to Preschoolers

Emotions run just as high for those who argue against giving homework to preschoolers. But for this group, there are more objective reasons that back their thinking.

Lack of Evidence: There is limited empirical evidence that supports the idea that homework in preschool leads to a significant “leg up” when it comes to academics. And the research that does exist is a far cry from an endorsement for homework. If anything, it stresses the importance of play and the need for anything done at home regarding a child’s education to be exploratory and engaging. (More on that later.) According to education and parenting expert Alfie Kohn , when it comes to assigning homework in early elementary school at all, “No research has ever found any benefit. It’s all pain and no gain.”
Developmentally Inappropriate: Critics argue that preschoolers are still in a stage of development where play and hands-on learning are crucial for their growth. If a preschooler who isn’t developmentally ready for homework gets too discouraged, they might “… internalize that they’re not smart or that they’re not good at school,” says Cathy Vatterott , a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the author of “Rethinking Homework.” And if they think they’re bad at school, they may feel inappropriate levels of …
Pressure & Stress: In a 2012 article “ Should Preschoolers Have Homework? ”, New York Times journalist Holly Korby did a survey of parents whose preschoolers were being assigned homework. Overwhelmingly, they all reported that the main change that homework made on their households was an increase in stress for everyone.
Family Time: Preschoolers need time to bond with their families, engage in creative activities, and explore the world around them. Excessive homework could interfere with these essential aspects of childhood. In fact, teachers often underestimate the amount of time homework takes by about 50% — that’s time that families would be spending together and are instead struggling through homework. And a 2019 Narbis poll found that 65% of parents reported that the stress of homework had negatively affected their family dynamic.
Inequality: For preschoolers, homework is a group activity. Parents have to be involved and help them with any assignment a teacher may send home. And if not all the children in a classroom have the same level of support at home, there’s an immediate jumpstart to educational inequality.

Is There a Compromise?

At Little Sunshine’s Playhouse, we feel strongly that homework is not appropriate for the children who attend our program. Our Reggio Emilia Philosophy believes in child-directed learning, which asserts that children are capable of learning and following their interests. Assigned homework is at odds with that concept. Instead, we work with our students in the classroom to create a rich learning environment that fosters learning and fuels their passion for education. Once that flame is lit, we have watched it carry on outside the walls of the classroom and into the lives of students — something that is arguably much more effective than a worksheet.

If your child’s preschool is assigning homework and you feel they shouldn’t be, feel empowered to have a conversation with teachers about the topic. At the very least, feel confident in making the argument that worksheets don’t accomplish much and, if the teacher insists on going the homework route, that the homework be exploring, playing, and listening to bedtime stories . Ultimately, the emphasis during the preschool years should be on fostering a positive attitude toward learning, curiosity, and social development.

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Reading & Math for K-5

Kindergarten
Learning numbers
Comparing numbers
Place Value
Roman numerals
Subtraction
Multiplication
Order of operations
Drills & practice
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Data & graphing
Word problems
Children's stories
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Conclusions & inferences

Sounds & phonics

Words & vocabulary, reading comprehension, early writing.

Numbers & counting

Simple math

Social skills

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Dolch sight words
Fry sight words
Multiple meaning words
Prefixes & suffixes
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Preschool & Kindergarten Worksheets

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Use these worksheets to learn about letters, sounds, words, numbers, colors, shapes and other early learning topics related to reading, writing and counting.

Identifying letters and writing the alphabet.

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Recognizing numbers, comparing numbers and counting.

Learning simple math concepts including addition and subtraction.

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Improving self-awareness, social skills and self-control.

Basic concepts such as "before/after", "above/below", etc.

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Homework in Preschool and Kindergarten

Homework from vanessa on Vimeo .

Preschool Homework

To do or not to do, that is the question! The topic of homework for young children is one that is fiercely debated in the field of early childhood education. Many parents and administrators are all for it, many teachers are against it.

Some schools mandate homework for Pre-K because they think it’s going to close the achievement gap, others do it because they think parents “expect it” and still others assign homework because it’s what they’ve always done. There’s a little something here for everyone, no matter what your situation.

Different types of homework has been shown to benefit different populations. The type of program you work in may also dictate the type of homework you send home, if any.

Parents and Homework

My goal for homework in my own classroom is to support and encourage parents as partners in their child’s education. It is my responsibility as the teacher to teach the required skills, but it is the parent’s job to help support me in my efforts. In other words, “It takes a village…” Some parents need more help and encouragement than others, it is also my job to offer that help and encouragement to those who need it.

Reading Aloud to Children as Homework

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic I encourage you to check out the online book study I hosted for The Read-Aloud Handbook .

Meaningful Homework Activities for Parents to Do With Children

The book Just Right Homework Activities for Pre-K offers many meaningful activities that parents can do at home with their children. It includes detailed instructions for parents for each activity as well as blackline masters.

Structured Homework

When working with Title 1 and programs that serve at-risk populations it may be necessary to provide parent training through educational sessions. All parents want to help their children, but not all parents know how to do so.

I created the video at the top of this page to show to parents at our “Homework Help” educational session.

Printable Personalized Practice Cards

With just one click of a button in ESGI , you can quickly generate parent letters for each child in your class along with corresponding flash cards, specifically aligned to each child’s individual needs.

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In the beginning, some components of a structured homework program might include:

First Name Identification & Writing Practice
Number Identification and Counting
Color Recognition- for those that need it
Shape Recognition-for those that need it
Letter Recognition
Books for parents to read aloud to their child (See my take-home book program )

As young children mature and their needs change some changes to the homework may be necessary, such as:

Last Name Identification & Writing Practice
Sight Words (for those who are ready)
Number identification, 20 and up
Rhyming and other phonemic awareness skills
Letter sounds

Of course, differentiation for students performing above or below grade level expectations should always be taken into consideration when assigning homework.

How Do I Get Started Setting Up a Homework Program?

Step 1 : Prepare your materials. Prepare the following materials to give to each child.

Name Card and Letter Tiles : Prepare a name card for every student using ABC Print Arrow font (see resources section) then print on cardstock and laminate. You could also use a sentence strip and a permanent to create name cards. You can use letter tiles from Wal-Mart or Staples or you can cut a matching sentence strip apart between the letters to make the name puzzle.

Number Flash Cards: You can use a simple font to type the numbers into a document in Word, print, laminate, cut, hole punch, and put on rings. The rings are highly recommended so the cards don’t become lost. You can also find free, printable number flash cards on-line.

Letter Flash Cards: The letter flash cards at left were made in Word using the ABC Print font, just print, laminate, cut, hole punch, and put on rings. Don’t forget to make one set of upper and one set of lowercase. The rings are highly recommended so the cards don’t become lost.

Color Flash Cards: The color flash cards pictured above were made by placing color stickers on paper. You can also find free, printable color flash cards on-line. The rings are highly recommended so the cards don’t become lost.
Shape Flash Cards: You can also find free, printable shape flash cards on-line. Just print, laminate, cut, hole punch, and put on rings.

Step 2: Next, you will need to create a system to communicate what activities you expect your students to do each night. One of the most effective ways to do this is by creating a monthly “Homework Calendar.”

You can get free calendars online that you can customize to meet your needs. In each space on the calendar indicate which activities you want parents to focus on each night, this helps parents from becoming overwhelmed. At the bottom of each space on the calendar there is a place for parents to sign indicating they have helped their child complete the assigned tasks. You can mark each space with a stamp or sticker to indicate your acknowledgement of homework completion. The homework calendars are kept in our BEAR books and carried back and forth by the child each day in his or her backpack.

If this method is too much for you then you may prefer the simpler Reading Log method .

Step 3: To implement a successful Pre-K Homework Program in your classroom you must meet with all the parents to explain your program. Do not expect your program to be successful without this critical component. Have an informational meeting or “Parent Night” and send home flyers to invite the parents. Make sure to include this event in your weekly newsletter as well.

When having parent education sessions such as this it is best to have some sort of prior arrangements made for the students and siblings to be outside of the classroom in an alternate location so the parents can focus on the information that is being presented.

After parents have arrived and you have welcomed them and thanked them for attending, show them the homework video (see top of page).
Next, use your document camera to show them the actual materials they will be receiving. Model how to use the materials and how to do each activity they were shown in the video.
Show them a sample homework calendar and what to do with it.
Explain your system for sending materials home in detail, for example will materials be sent home in a bag or a folder?
Make sure parents thoroughly understand the purpose and expectations for your homework program as well as your system.
Allow parents to ask questions and thank them again for attending.

You could also create a video like the one at the top of this page to show to parents.

Additional Information:

Homework should last no more than 5-10 minutes total each night including the book that parents read to their child.
Worksheets should never be sent home as homework. This sends the message to parents that worksheets are an acceptable form of “work” and it is a good teaching practice when the exact opposite is true.
Homework at this age should be fun and children should enjoy doing it. Advise parents that if their child does not seem to enjoy homework time they should make an appointment to see you so you can help them determine what is wrong and how to make it fun.
Emphasize that reading to their children every day is the single most important thing they can do as parents. It is also highly recommended that you show the parents one of the following short video clips about the importance of reading to their children:

How to Help Your Child Read (English) How to Read Out Loud to Your Preschooler (English) Como ayudar a tu hijo leer (Spanish)

Homework Links

Homework Tip Sheet
Name homework explanation
Ways to Help Your Child Learn the Alphabet at Home
Supporting Math Skills at Home

More Teaching Tips from Pre-K Pages

Homework for Preschool Students

Homework is a very touchy subject when it comes to very young children. This is probably because when people think of homework, they think of worksheets. That would not be developmentally appropriate for preschoolers, but homework does not have to mean worksheets. Preschoolers do not typically get homework, or at least not in the same way an older child would. The more a child practices a skill though, the better. That is all homework is after all, practice.

For preschoolers, homework can actually be quite a bit of fun since they can practice the skills that they are working on through play and exploration. In preschool, the goal of homework should be to practice a skill and to show parents how they can support their child’s learning. Here are a few things to think about when deciding whether or not to give your preschoolers homework.

WHAT THEY SHOULD BE LEARNING

As with anything in preschool, when you are planning homework activities for your preschoolers it is important to be intentional. Use your observations and assessments of your preschoolers to inform your planning. Their homework should have them working on the skills that they need the most practice with, which means that it should be individualized as much as possible.

Any homework that focuses on fine motor skills, literacy, or problem solving will benefit your preschoolers a great deal and help them reach their developmental goals. Here is a list of things you can have your preschoolers do for homework.

Playing board games
Scavenger hunts
Matching games
Letter recognition activities
Scissor skills practice
Simple crafts
Sorting by color, shape, or size
Science experiments
Sight words games (for those that are ready)

HOW LONG SHOULD HOMEWORK TIME TAKE

Any homework that you give to your preschoolers should be open ended and allow the child to decide how long they interact with it. The more engaging their homework is, the more they will want to do it.

It is important to consider the parents’ time as well. One of the goals of homework in preschool is to teach parents how they can support their child’s learning and development. If the homework takes too long, or is too complicated, the parents will be less likely to have their child do it. Design your preschoolers’ homework to be activities that the parent can engage with them for a time, and then the child can continue on their own if they choose to.

HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU ASSIGN HOMEWORK

In preschool, homework should never be required. You want your preschoolers to want to do it. If the homework that you give to your preschoolers is fun and engaging, and easy for their parents to implement, your preschoolers will look forward to doing it. You could assign homework every night, or just for over the weekends. It is completely up to you, there is no right or wrong answer to how often you should give your preschoolers homework.

It is important to make any homework that you give to your preschoolers fun. The goal is to foster a love of learning after all. Make sure that your preschoolers’ homework is something that they will get a lot out of, even if they only work on it for a few minutes.

group of children laying on the floor working on independent work

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What Kids Learn in Preschool

A typical preschool curriculum covers concepts like colors, shapes, and letters, plus social and school-readiness skills such as how to take turns.

What Do Kids Learn in Preschool?

Academic Concepts
Motor Skills
Social and School-Readiness Skills

How Preschool Curriculum Is Implemented

What To Look for in a Preschool

From learning how to take turns to counting to 10, preschool is all about discovery. By the time your child graduates from pre-K, they will have learned a lot. The entire span of lessons and content that your child will be taught during preschool education is what's known as the preschool curriculum.

Depending on the type of preschool you choose and the early childhood education philosophy it follows, your child's preschool curriculum may explore a wide variety of academic, social, physical, and emotional lessons. In addition to academics and social skills, many preschools also work on critical speech and fine motor skills.

In some settings, preschools are also able to help children complete their toilet training. By the time they get to kindergarten, children who attend preschool should be ready to speak in longer phrases and sentences, use a pair of scissors, follow instructions, and kick a ball. Learn more about preschool curriculum and what kids learn in preschool.

Sean Justice / Getty Images

Preschools teach the basics to kids, giving them a strong foundation for the elementary years. This includes academic concepts of literacy and math, such as counting, coloring, letter recognition, and developing gross and fine motor skills , such as walking in a line and using a pencil. It also includes social and school-readiness skills, such as making friends, sharing, and taking turns.

Academic Concepts in Preschool Curriculum

The preschool curriculum offered at one child's preschool may vary significantly from what is offered at other schools. This is because preschools are not governed by the standards that apply to K–12 education.

Individual schools and groups of schools have the freedom to teach what they please in the manner they prefer. For example, preschools affiliated with religious institutions may include religious education in their curriculum. Montessori preschools use specific materials and activities to encourage children in hands-on learning.

Teachers may also adjust their educational approaches to suit the needs of individual children in their classrooms. While preschools don't all adhere to the same educational guidelines, they're intended to prepare students for kindergarten . That means most effective preschools work on key skill areas, which include math, science, and literacy skills.

Important concepts in the preschool curriculum include the following:

Calendar, including the seasons, days of the week, and months of the year
Cooperation
Drawing and painting
Physical activities like running, jumping, skipping, hopping on one foot, and using playground equipment and balls
Sorting objects
Taking turns
Transitioning from one activity to another
Writing letters and numbers

Motor Skills in Preschool Curriculum

Preschool-age children are learning to master both gross motor skills (which involve large physical movements) and fine motor skills (such as manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination). Many preschools spend time actively engaged in working on these developmental skills.

Fine motor activities, which are important for writing, grasping, and coordinating fine movements, include drawing, cutting, coloring, and gluing. Gross motor skills are often worked on during recess and may involve using playground equipment, running, skipping, jumping, and kicking or throwing a ball to a partner.

Social and School-Readiness Skills in Preschool Curriculum

Preschool also aims to teach kids social-emotional and school-readiness skills. These lessons include teaching kids how to function in a group setting , with an emphasis on behaviors like sharing, turn-taking, cooperative play, transitioning from one activity to the next, and following classroom rules. Preschool also helps kids learn self-care skills they will need in kindergarten, such as putting on their own shoes and coats, feeding themselves, and using the bathroom independently.

Most preschools have a set of goals and a philosophy to which each teacher must adhere. In some cases, teachers follow those general guidelines informally. In many cases, teachers use specific lesson plans and rubrics for assessing student progress.

Preschool curricula take into account the length of the preschool day. Some preschools run for only a few hours a day, while others (especially in public school settings) operate all day. Some even run longer than a typical school day to cover parents' work hours.

During any given day, preschoolers may take part in:

Field trips designed to enhance a lesson, such as a trip to the post office to learn about mail or a visit to the grocery store to learn about choosing healthy foods
Sessions with special guest speakers who are brought in to provide more details to a lesson, such as a firefighter to talk about fire safety or a dentist to discuss oral health
Special activities taught either by the primary preschool teacher or a special art, music, library, or physical education teacher
Specific activities, such as circle time, song time, calendar time, active playtime, storytime, and craft time
Transitional periods that exist between activities like learning how to walk in a line with peers and how to clean up toys and supplies

A preschool curriculum can also encompass homework given to the child to reinforce what was learned in the classroom , but many educators also believe that homework is unnecessary at such a young age.

While it may look like a preschooler is simply playing in the preschool classroom all day, that's not the case. Play is so much more than a child having fun, though kids are certainly having lots of that. Especially when it involves interacting with other children, play teaches young children how to:

Form friendships
Learn how to cooperate
Think creatively
Try out different ways of problem-solving
Use their imaginations

Different types of play , including structured and unstructured play, allow children to practice different skills in different ways.

What To Look for in a Preschool Curriculum

No matter which philosophy your preschool follows (Bank Street, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and HighScope are common ones), the preschool curriculum should promote learning while helping children meet the various language, social, physical, and cognitive goals. In an ideal situation, a quality preschool curriculum will be taught by certified teachers and be based on the most up-to-date childhood education research.

Depending on the school and the school's philosophy, the preschool curriculum can be developed by administrators, teachers, and in some cases, even parents. If you ever have a question about the curriculum or anything that's going on at your child's preschool, reach out to the teacher or preschool administrator.

Early Learning . National Institute of Child Health and Human Development . 2021.

Montessori Early Childhood Programs . American Montessori Society . n.d.

About Early Learning . National Institute of Child Health and Human Development . 2021.

The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children . Pediatrics . 2018.

Early Childhood Education . US Department of Education . 2014.

The Importance of Homework

It’s the bane of many children’s lives, but homework does serve an important educational purpose and it’s helpful for parents to encourage a healthy attitude to homework from an early age.

Going to school all day is enough for some children, so coming home and having to do more work isn’t much fun. However as much as they hate homework, it is an important part of their education and learning. It can be hard work cajoling children into sitting down and dutifully doing any homework they’ve been set, but in the long run it’s definitely worth persisting with it.

As parents, you can play a role by trying to encourage a healthy attitude to homework. Rather than focusing on the negatives (having to sit down and work when they want to go out and play) try and help children see that homework can be fun.

When they’re young, homework won’t be long and arduous and there may be tasks set that you can all join in with and offer insight into. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you do their homework for them, but you can get actively involved in helping them find answers, do research or work through problem-solving activities.

If your child is still very reluctant to do any work at home, then it may also help to offer small incentives. For example, this could be allowing them to go out and play, play a computer game or watch television when they’ve done their homework. It’s probably best to avoid large incentives, such as monetary payments, especially for young children.

Why Is Homework Important?

Homework is an important extension of classroom learning. It helps to cement the ideas that children learn at school (or should be learning!), helping things sink in further and expanding their knowledge. Homework can take various forms, consisting of:

Solving problems of a mathematical or scientific nature.
Answering a series of questions.
Writing creative prose and short stories.
Keeping a journal of holiday or weekend experiences.
Writing an essay.
Preparation for a test, such as a spelling test, where you need to learn certain word spellings.
Looking things up in an encyclopedia or on the Internet to improve research skills.
Finding things out about themselves or their families.

The complexity and amount of homework that needs to be carried out obviously increases considerably as children progress through school. The amount of homework given to primary aged children varies, but they are likely to get some on a regular basis. Getting used to doing homework from an early age will definitely be an advantage, as children are more likely to continue doing so as they progress through their school years.

Some schools promote the use of homework diaries, which are ideal for making a note of what homework you’re supposed to be doing. Without them, there are always some children who forget to write down the details or miss what was being said. Not handing in any homework can get them into trouble at school and isn’t a pattern or habit that you want them to caught up in.

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Kindergarten Homework: Too Much Too Early?

Kindergarten has taken some getting used to for Walker Sheppard, who didn’t attend preschool or day care. Besides all the new rules to remember, there’s a new nightly routine: homework.

“We spend anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour on it,” said Michael Sheppard, Walker’s dad.

When the 5-year-old comes home every day, Sheppard said, his son is tired and not ready to sit down and figure out his assignments.

“He doesn’t like it,” said Sheppard, who lives in Pulaski, Va. “The first week he went to school he asked us why he was having to do schoolwork at home.”

That’s a question a lot of parents are asking, especially when it comes to the youngest pupils. Studies by researchers including Harris Cooper, a Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor who wrote The Battle Over Homework , have consistently shown that homework has minimal academic benefits for children in the early-elementary years.

Instead, both the National Education Association and the National PTA endorse Cooper’s so-called 10-minute rule, which calls for roughly 10 minutes of homework a night per grade level beginning in 1st grade. So children in 2nd grade would have 20 minutes, those in 3rd grade would have 30 minutes, and so on. In high school, students may exceed that recommendation depending on the difficulty of the courses they choose.

Split Opinions

Those guidelines don’t even mention kindergarten. But that’s not stopping educators in many places from assigning homework.

Delilah Orti said that every Monday her daughter, Mia, a kindergartner last year in the Miami-Dade Public Schools system in Florida, received a homework packet with about 25 worksheets that were due at the end of that week.

Orti said the packet included work on phonics, spelling, reading comprehension, and social studies. She describes her daughter as a quick learner who was already reading in kindergarten but still needed her help with word problems and science worksheets.

“She could read the words, but she had no idea what they meant,” said Orti.

Orti said Mia spent 30 minutes reading every night and an hour on the packet.

“I felt that it was inappropriate for that age,” said Orti. “What she was getting for homework was more busywork. I don’t think she was getting anything out of it and I think it was way too much.”

But such concerns aren’t shared by administrators or parents at Arlington Traditional School, a countywide elementary school in Arlington, Va., with a waiting list of parents eager for their children to attend.

Kindergartners there are expected to do 30 minutes of homework a night, Monday through Thursday.

Every student at the school is expected to spend 15 minutes reading a night. For kindergartners who can’t read yet, that means their parents are expected to read to them. The other 15 minutes is spent doing things like dictating a story to their parents using words that start with a sound they’ve been learning in class or exercises that involve circling that letter.

“We feel that this is a connection that we want with parents,” said Holly Hawthorne, the school’s principal. “We want them to know what their children are learning at school, we want them to know how they’re doing in school, if the work is too hard, if it’s too easy, we want them to be able to support what the kids are learning at school at home as well.”

Eliminating Packets

Still, some kindergarten teachers remain firm in their opposition to mandatory homework.

Barbara Knapp used to assign her kindergarten pupils at Bradley Elementary School in Corralitos, Calif., weekly homework packets. But that all changed 10 years ago during the Great Recession.

“Teachers were only given two reams of paper a month at my school, so we were forced to cut back,” said Knapp.

She and some of her colleagues at the school located about 90 miles south of San Francisco decided a good way to do that would be to eliminate those homework packets. During that time, she said, she started to research homework and found the case against it for young elementary pupils very compelling.

“The research showed that there was no correlation between school success and the traditional paper-pencil homework in kindergarten,” said Knapp, who has 19 years of classroom-teaching experience.

When she was assigning homework, Knapp said parents sometimes complained that it was frustrating for their children. Other times, it was obvious the parents had done the work rather than the child.

Now, Knapp only assigns nightly reading of her pupils’ choice, a move that she credits with making them better readers. She adds that she hasn’t seen any deterioration in other skills since she eliminated traditional homework, and she’s been able to spend more time on lesson preparation rather than grading homework.

“It’s been great not having to focus on homework,” said Knapp. “Putting together the packet, running them all off, grading them all, it was a huge amount of time that was being taken instead of us planning really wonderful, rich, in-class lessons. Homework took away a lot of planning time for just a bunch of busywork.”

Risk of ‘Busywork’ vs. Parental Bonding

Cathy Vatterott is no fan of busywork at any grade level and doesn’t think homework should be part of kindergarten. She’s a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the author of Rethinking Homework . “There’s enough of an adjustment for young children in kindergarten without throwing in homework,” said Vatterott.

And she worries that adjusting to school routines combined with homework could turn off young students to learning.

“I want to make sure that they don’t hate school,” said Vatterott, who noted that young children learn best through play.

She also points to a 2016 University of Virginia study, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” which found that kindergarten in 2010 was more like the 1st grade of the late 1990s. Vatterott says she’s concerned that children who aren’t developmentally ready for this work might “internalize that they’re not smart or that they’re not good at school.”

But keeping the bond strong between home and school is one of the reasons that Duke researcher Cooper doesn’t mind homework for pupils in kindergarten, with a few caveats.

“The assignments need to be short, simple, and lead to success,” said Cooper. “We don’t want young children to get frustrated with homework. We don’t want them to get bored, and we don’t want them to begin thinking that schoolwork is too difficult for them so that they begin to develop a self-image of not being a good student.”

Finding a Balance

Some kindergarten teachers are embracing short, unique assignments for their pupils that don’t involve worksheets.

Shannon Brescher Shea’s son’s kindergarten teacher provides a list of activities the children can do at home if they choose. The activities ask them, for instance, to draw a picture of what they did over the weekend or collect and count a handful of leaves by ones.

Shea says after visiting her son’s classroom in suburban Rockville, Md., and seeing how much work he does, she’s even more against the idea of mandatory homework for children in kindergarten.

“They are going through so much energy and so much focus at school already and exerting so much self-control that to then have these kids come home and do homework on top of that is a recipe for them not wanting to go to school and not enjoying learning,” said Shea.

Jennifer Craven’s daughter is also in kindergarten this year, and she said so far the young girl has been asked to “practice tying shoes, practice writing her name, and read two books each night.”

Craven, who lives in Meadville, Pa., a city about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, said her family would be doing these activities anyway, and for now, her daughter thinks homework is fun.

“I think this is very age appropriate and I don’t mind the use of the term ‘homework’ at this age, as they will realize what real homework is soon enough,” said Craven.

Michael Sheppard talked to his son’s teacher in Pulaski about the homework she assigns. He said the 30-year classroom veteran acted like it was out of her hands.

Sheppard, 42, who attended school in the same district as his son, Walker, said he didn’t have to deal with homework until well after kindergarten.

“Maybe there should be homework,” said Sheppard. “I just think it would be better starting at 3rd grade.”

A version of this article appeared in the November 28, 2018 edition of Education Week as Kindergarten Homework Debate: Too Much Too Soon?

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Kindergarten Homework: Is It Appropriate?

April 11, 2015

Homework has become somewhat of a hot topic lately. I’ve read articles about schools adopting no-homework policies. I’ve seen research on the ineffectiveness of homework. I’ve found infographics on the absence of homework in other successful nations.

All of this has made me question whether or not my students should have homework. I’m a reading specialist, so I don’t assign homework in my current position. But as a Kindergarten teacher, I did give out a very brief weekly homework packet. Was it a waste of my time? Did I damage my students’ learning or home lives? Should Kindergarteners have homework at all?

I believe that Kindergarteners can benefit from a very small, purposeful amount of simple homework. No, I don’t mean 5 meaningless worksheets a night. No, I don’t mean elaborate projects that their parents end up doing. But I do feel that a very small amount of Kindergarten homework can be valuable, particularly when the homework is reading . And here’s why:

Homework is an opportunity for parents to show kids that they value education. When a parent (or other family member) sits down with a child to work on homework, that adult figure is telling the child, “Hey, this is important. This is something I value.”
Homework can give parents an idea of what students are working on in class. Kindergarten was a long time ago for many parents! Kindergarten expectations have also changed greatly over the years. By assigning meaningful homework that is relevant to what is going on in class, we can give parents a window into their children’s daily lives and learning.
Homework can provide students with additional practice and repetition. I don’t know about you, but my Kinders sure need a lot of repetition to master concepts! Having my students spend 5-10 minutes practicing something outside of school is an opportunity to get in some of that extra practice.
Homework can send kids the message that learning needn’t be restricted to school. When you assign kids meaningful homework that encourages them to interact with their families and home environment, this sends the message that learning happens everywhere – not just at school. Here’s an example of a simple homework task that sends this message: “Find 4 things in your house that start with the letter g. Draw them on this paper.”

What Appropriate Kindergarten Homework Looks Like

Okay, so what kind of homework is appropriate for Kindergarten? Here are some suggestions for designing positive homework experiences:

Emphasize reading. It’s so valuable for kids to spend time reading with their parents. Maybe for homework you request that parents read with their children for 10 minutes a night – and that’s it!
Give assignments that are SUPER brief! Kindergarteners’ attention spans are short. So their homework should be short, too! If I send home a task, I try for something that can be completed in about 5-10 minutes. If you do send home a small weekly homework packet, make sure to educate parents about the importance of doing some each night (rather than all of it on Thursday night!). Check in periodically with students and parents to make sure that the homework isn’t taking too long. (And don’t feel like you “have to” give homework every day…many kids have a long day at school already.)
Provide tasks that are meaningful. An assignment like “Find 4 things in your house that start with the letter g. Draw them on this paper” is more fun and engaging than a worksheet on the letter g! When possible, involve family members in completing the homework. Games and scavenger hunts can get everyone in the family involved!
Assign tasks at the right difficulty level. Why assign homework at all if it’s way too easy or way too hard? It may take a little time, but giving students slightly different homework can help maximize its effectiveness.
Create a “homework bag” to provide necessary materials. If you think that students may not have pencils or crayons at home, why not send a few home with the homework? Also, reading with an adult makes for a wonderful homework assignment, but make sure to send home books. Many families do not have access to books in the home.

Challenges of Assigning Kindergarten Homework

In theory, the suggestions above can be relatively easy to implement. But it’s never quite that easy, is it? Here are some of the challenges that I (and my colleagues) have encountered when assigning homework to our students:

Not all students have parent or family support to complete homework. I believe strongly in educating parents during Open House and other school events about the importance of devoting home time to learning. However, some parents are still not able to help students with homework for a variety of reasons (language barrier, time, education, etc.).
Finding or creating differentiated homework assignments is very time consuming. I always have a huge range of abilities in my classroom, and I want to provide homework assignments at my students’ individual levels. I don’t want students to become frustrated by the homework, or completely bored by it. But differentiating homework takes a TON of time!
Keeping up with missing assignments can be challenging. Kids don’t always turn in their homework. I can’t tell you how many times I inquired about a missing homework assignment, only to find out that it had been in the child’s backpack for a week! Kids also don’t always do their homework. Trying to track down missing assignments can take up a lot of time.

Conclusions

In spite of these challenges, I still believe that a small amount of homework or time spent reading with parents can be very valuable for Kindergarteners. Because I know firsthand how time-consuming it can be to find the right homework for students, I’ve created a Leveled Literacy Homework series that you can use with your Kindergarten (or 1st grade) students.

The idea behind the series is to give you materials that are engaging and meaningful (like family games), can be used to differentiate your homework assignments, and are ideal for students who either do or do not have family help with completing their homework.

All activities (except for simple worksheets) come with parent instructions in English and Spanish. They also have links to optional videos that parents can choose to watch to learn how to read with their child or play the literacy games together. To learn more about the series, click on the image below.

What do you like to use for homework in your Kindergarten classroom?

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Good information

…i love the information😘😘

Can you specify the age of the child i can apply these techniques upon??

Hi Diana, this article is mostly about 5-6 year old children.

[…] specialist (and former kindergarten teacher) Alison at Learning at the Primary Pond advocates for a small amount of meaningful homework in elementary school, even for kindergarteners, […]

Being the mum of a kindergartener, single mother infact, that works full time shift work and 2 hrs away from any family or friends, I genuinely disagree with homework at this age. I have enough to juggle let alone adding an hour into an already stretched out day, where my son has been at school and then oosh all day, to argue about him not wanting to do homework and IF he sits long enough to attempt the homework.. it strains our relationship. There is no one else around to help with homework, there is always copious amounts of homework … Read more »

All great points you bring up – thanks for sharing!

We’ll Said. I found the reasoning above to be so thin and void of true reasons for having a 5-year old do homework. They’ll have so many more years to learn homework and the value of education. We send our kids to school for 8 hours a day, I’m sure they’ll understand someday that we as parents value education. I don’t need to do a silly exercise with them to get that point across.

I’m Alison, a literacy specialist. I love getting kids excited about reading and writing – and sharing teaching ideas with other teachers!

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Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

A s kids return to school, debate is heating up once again over how they should spend their time after they leave the classroom for the day.

The no-homework policy of a second-grade teacher in Texas went viral last week , earning praise from parents across the country who lament the heavy workload often assigned to young students. Brandy Young told parents she would not formally assign any homework this year, asking students instead to eat dinner with their families, play outside and go to bed early.

But the question of how much work children should be doing outside of school remains controversial, and plenty of parents take issue with no-homework policies, worried their kids are losing a potential academic advantage. Here’s what you need to know:

For decades, the homework standard has been a “10-minute rule,” which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. Second graders, for example, should do about 20 minutes of homework each night. High school seniors should complete about two hours of homework each night. The National PTA and the National Education Association both support that guideline.

But some schools have begun to give their youngest students a break. A Massachusetts elementary school has announced a no-homework pilot program for the coming school year, lengthening the school day by two hours to provide more in-class instruction. “We really want kids to go home at 4 o’clock, tired. We want their brain to be tired,” Kelly Elementary School Principal Jackie Glasheen said in an interview with a local TV station . “We want them to enjoy their families. We want them to go to soccer practice or football practice, and we want them to go to bed. And that’s it.”

A New York City public elementary school implemented a similar policy last year, eliminating traditional homework assignments in favor of family time. The change was quickly met with outrage from some parents, though it earned support from other education leaders.

New solutions and approaches to homework differ by community, and these local debates are complicated by the fact that even education experts disagree about what’s best for kids.

The research

The most comprehensive research on homework to date comes from a 2006 meta-analysis by Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper, who found evidence of a positive correlation between homework and student achievement, meaning students who did homework performed better in school. The correlation was stronger for older students—in seventh through 12th grade—than for those in younger grades, for whom there was a weak relationship between homework and performance.

Cooper’s analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement—test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills. On the other hand, some studies he examined showed that homework can cause physical and emotional fatigue, fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children. At the end of his analysis, Cooper recommended further study of such potential effects of homework.

Despite the weak correlation between homework and performance for young children, Cooper argues that a small amount of homework is useful for all students. Second-graders should not be doing two hours of homework each night, he said, but they also shouldn’t be doing no homework.

Not all education experts agree entirely with Cooper’s assessment.

Cathy Vatterott, an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school.

“Correlation is not causation,” she said. “Does homework cause achievement, or do high achievers do more homework?”

Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs , thinks there should be more emphasis on improving the quality of homework tasks, and she supports efforts to eliminate homework for younger kids.

“I have no concerns about students not starting homework until fourth grade or fifth grade,” she said, noting that while the debate over homework will undoubtedly continue, she has noticed a trend toward limiting, if not eliminating, homework in elementary school.

The issue has been debated for decades. A TIME cover in 1999 read: “Too much homework! How it’s hurting our kids, and what parents should do about it.” The accompanying story noted that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to a push for better math and science education in the U.S. The ensuing pressure to be competitive on a global scale, plus the increasingly demanding college admissions process, fueled the practice of assigning homework.

“The complaints are cyclical, and we’re in the part of the cycle now where the concern is for too much,” Cooper said. “You can go back to the 1970s, when you’ll find there were concerns that there was too little, when we were concerned about our global competitiveness.”

Cooper acknowledged that some students really are bringing home too much homework, and their parents are right to be concerned.

“A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” he said. “If you take too little, they’ll have no effect. If you take too much, they can kill you. If you take the right amount, you’ll get better.”

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Motherlode | should preschoolers have homework, should preschoolers have homework.

A Facebook friend recently posted her frustration with trying to get her third-grade daughter to sit down and do her nightly homework. “Oh, yeah?” replied a friend of said friend in the comments, a New Jersey mother named Jennifer. “You should try it with a 4-year-old.”

My youngest son has yet to enter preschool, and when my older child was there, he spent more time in “circle” than on worksheets. Jennifer said that nightly homework assignments sent home with her preschooler frustrated both of them. “I watch him slumped over our coffee table, fake crying and moaning, begging to play. I know he’s not ready for the discipline, but I feel compelled to make him turn in his assignments. He’s not ready and neither am I!” As a parent, I wasn’t ready either. Jennifer’s story had to be a wild aberration, far from the norm — one child, one family, one wildly competitive preschool perhaps?

It wasn’t. Most preschoolers may not be lugging backpacks of books yet, but when I reached out to friends and friends of friends via a Facebook post of my own, I found a diverse group of parents all over the country completing — or attempting to complete — nightly homework with their wiggling preschoolers, ostensibly to “prepare” them for kindergarten homework.

The parents I spoke with, who send their children to paid preschool in places like Chicago, the five boroughs of New York, New Jersey and the St. Louis suburbs, are looking at a range of kindergarten options, from private to public to magnet to charter. The homework in question is typically worksheets — copying or coloring letters and numbers and name-writing practice, proficiencies that are required for some magnet school entrance “assessments.” And while most parents agreed that the idea of preschool homework was absurd, most also went along with it anyway.

Yet according to the education and parenting expert Alfie Kohn, the author of “The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing,” a close look at all the research available contradicts this practice. In an e-mail regarding homework for young children, Mr. Kohn told me, “No research has ever found any benefit. It’s all pain and no gain.”

Homework may also take away from valuable play and family time, as the teacher and parent Jessica Lahey laments in her post on this blog, “I Hate Homework. I Assign It Anyway.” Early childhood experts tell us that play should be the top priority in preschool, and documentaries like “Race to Nowhere” remind us that many kids are burned out by the time they get to high school.

So after a day at school, why are we bringing home more work for the barely potty-trained? I remember being horrified when my oldest son brought home nightly homework in public kindergarten. Tired and spent from a full day of academics, he couldn’t focus, he begged for it to be over, and my husband and I spent hours coaxing him to fill out a worksheet that should have taken five minutes.

But did I say anything to the teacher about it? Not a word.

Neither did the preschool parents I spoke with. What’s more, they didn’t want to say anything at all. Several parents refused to be quoted on the topic. One parent put it plainly: getting into a decent school is hard enough, I don’t want this to come back and haunt me. Why are parents afraid to say they don’t like preschool homework? If we parents think that homework (or any policy or practice) is making our children miserable, why wouldn’t we say something about it?

Pressure to test preschoolers for entrance into coveted gifted and talented programs makes it even harder to protest. Vassiliki, a mother from Chicago, did balk; she told me she refused to turn in her preschool daughter’s nightly homework. “The idea was revolting to me,” she said. But Vassiliki also acknowledged that her daughter’s private preschool, located within a Chicago public magnet school, had a cozy relationship with the magnet’s gifted and talented program. “The kids get primed to ace the ‘gifted’ system-wide tests.” Homework (whether it’s turned in or not) is part of that priming.

One reason parents may be reluctant to speak up, says Mr. Kohn, is our nearly unconditional acceptance of schools’ authority. Instead, busy parents may spend more time finding ways to deal with the unpleasant homework instead of confronting the school. Jennifer from New Jersey eventually asked her child’s preschool teachers if there was a way to reduce his workload. “They said it shouldn’t be about frustrating the kids, so now he will be given just one sheet of letters to practice per week. They said, ‘Look, this is only preschool.”

But we should be asking bigger questions — like if the real reason we’re not saying no to preschool homework is because, in today’s rush to get young children into academics, we fear our child will fall behind. We parents should stick up for what preschool does well — teaching kids how to socialize, take turns, and work in a group. Preparing children to read and write during the hours of the school day is fine, but a preschooler’s “homework” should be exploring, playing and listening to bedtime stories.

As we demand academics from younger and younger children, will there come a time when 4-year-olds are no longer prepared for the demands of pre-K? And then is homework for 3-year-olds around the corner? A few years ago, preschool homework might have been a headline in The Onion, but we don’t seem to be laughing. Instead, somewhere out there, someone is busily developing “Worksheets for the Womb.”

What's Next

Should Kids Get Homework?

Homework gives elementary students a way to practice concepts, but too much can be harmful, experts say.

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Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful.

How much homework students should get has long been a source of debate among parents and educators. In recent years, some districts have even implemented no-homework policies, as students juggle sports, music and other activities after school.

Parents of elementary school students, in particular, have argued that after-school hours should be spent with family or playing outside rather than completing assignments. And there is little research to show that homework improves academic achievement for elementary students.

But some experts say there's value in homework, even for younger students. When done well, it can help students practice core concepts and develop study habits and time management skills. The key to effective homework, they say, is keeping assignments related to classroom learning, and tailoring the amount by age: Many experts suggest no homework for kindergartners, and little to none in first and second grade.

Value of Homework

Homework provides a chance to solidify what is being taught in the classroom that day, week or unit. Practice matters, says Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University 's Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

"There really is no other domain of human ability where anybody would say you don't need to practice," she adds. "We have children practicing piano and we have children going to sports practice several days a week after school. You name the domain of ability and practice is in there."

Homework is also the place where schools and families most frequently intersect.

"The children are bringing things from the school into the home," says Paula S. Fass, professor emerita of history at the University of California—Berkeley and the author of "The End of American Childhood." "Before the pandemic, (homework) was the only real sense that parents had to what was going on in schools."

Harris Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework," examined more than 60 research studies on homework between 1987 and 2003 and found that — when designed properly — homework can lead to greater student success. Too much, however, is harmful. And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary.

"Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing should be appropriate for their developmental level," he says. "For teachers, it's a balancing act. Doing away with homework completely is not in the best interest of children and families. But overburdening families with homework is also not in the child's or a family's best interest."

Negative Homework Assignments

Not all homework for elementary students involves completing a worksheet. Assignments can be fun, says Cooper, like having students visit educational locations, keep statistics on their favorite sports teams, read for pleasure or even help their parents grocery shop. The point is to show students that activities done outside of school can relate to subjects learned in the classroom.

But assignments that are just busy work, that force students to learn new concepts at home, or that are overly time-consuming can be counterproductive, experts say.

Homework that's just busy work.

Effective homework reinforces math, reading, writing or spelling skills, but in a way that's meaningful, experts say. Assignments that look more like busy work – projects or worksheets that don't require teacher feedback and aren't related to topics learned in the classroom – can be frustrating for students and create burdens for families.

"The mental health piece has definitely played a role here over the last couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the last thing we want to do is frustrate students with busy work or homework that makes no sense," says Dave Steckler, principal of Red Trail Elementary School in Mandan, North Dakota.

Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.

With the pressure to cover all topics on standardized tests and limited time during the school day, some teachers assign homework that has not yet been taught in the classroom.

Not only does this create stress, but it also causes equity challenges. Some parents speak languages other than English or work several jobs, and they aren't able to help teach their children new concepts.

" It just becomes agony for both parents and the kids to get through this worksheet, and the goal becomes getting to the bottom of (the) worksheet with answers filled in without any understanding of what any of it matters for," says professor Susan R. Goldman, co-director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois—Chicago .

Homework that's overly time-consuming.

The standard homework guideline recommended by the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association is the "10-minute rule" – 10 minutes of nightly homework per grade level. A fourth grader, for instance, would receive a total of 40 minutes of homework per night.

But this does not always happen, especially since not every student learns the same. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Family Therapy found that primary school children actually received three times the recommended amount of homework — and that family stress increased along with the homework load.

Young children can only remain attentive for short periods, so large amounts of homework, especially lengthy projects, can negatively affect students' views on school. Some individual long-term projects – like having to build a replica city, for example – typically become an assignment for parents rather than students, Fass says.

"It's one thing to assign a project like that in which several kids are working on it together," she adds. "In (that) case, the kids do normally work on it. It's another to send it home to the families, where it becomes a burden and doesn't really accomplish very much."

Private vs. Public Schools

Do private schools assign more homework than public schools? There's little research on the issue, but experts say private school parents may be more accepting of homework, seeing it as a sign of academic rigor.

Of course, not all private schools are the same – some focus on college preparation and traditional academics, while others stress alternative approaches to education.

"I think in the academically oriented private schools, there's more support for homework from parents," says Gerald K. LeTendre, chair of educational administration at Pennsylvania State University—University Park . "I don't know if there's any research to show there's more homework, but it's less of a contentious issue."

How to Address Homework Overload

First, assess if the workload takes as long as it appears. Sometimes children may start working on a homework assignment, wander away and come back later, Cooper says.

"Parents don't see it, but they know that their child has started doing their homework four hours ago and still not done it," he adds. "They don't see that there are those four hours where their child was doing lots of other things. So the homework assignment itself actually is not four hours long. It's the way the child is approaching it."

But if homework is becoming stressful or workload is excessive, experts suggest parents first approach the teacher, followed by a school administrator.

"Many times, we can solve a lot of issues by having conversations," Steckler says, including by "sitting down, talking about the amount of homework, and what's appropriate and not appropriate."

Study Tips for High School Students

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Toddler and preschool activities

Written by Muneebah • Nov 12, 2024 • Leave a Comment

33+ Letter G Activities (Free Version Included)

These Letter G Activities, targeted at preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students, are a great way to enhance vocabulary, letter recognition and formation, fine motor skills, and even a few math concepts! There are many hands-on activities and worksheets that are perfect for revision.

In this post, you will find TWO activity packs that are a grand addition to your letter of the week theme. I have a FREE version as well as a more detailed paid version. Have a look at both and pick one (or both!) that meets your learning and teaching needs. The packs are suitable for kids aged 3-6.

Letter G Pack

The pack includes uppercase and lowercase activities for small and big kids. My older daughter and my youngest both enjoyed these!

There is so much to enjoy. There are letter G posters to display, flash cards to practice, and tracing pages. You’ll notice that there are flash cards with cartoon pictures and real-life pictures- the kids love this because they can pick what they prefer. This encourages them to take initiative in their learning experience.

There are also clip cards, mazes, and play dough activities. These are hands-on and improve fine motor skills.

These alphabet printables are great for literacy centers. Let’s talk about the shop/product version first that can be purchased here .

Letter G Vocabulary

1. Letter G Words Chart – Vocabulary is a key factor in a child’s success. It improves all forms of communication including speaking, reading and writing. This word chart is simple but effective.

3. Letter G Flashcards – Featuring real-life photos and cartoon pictures for vocabulary words beginning with G. Encourage sensory play by hiding one set in a sensory bin . Let the kids match the cards they ‘find’ with the other set.

2. Letter G Words 3 Part Cards – Match the pictures beginning with the letter G to the word and the whole card. Matching improves memory retention.

Letter G Formation Handwriting and Fine Motor Skills

4. Letter G Poster – Display in any learning space or use it as an activity mat by tracing the letter G with a dry-erase marker.

6. Letter G Tracing Pages and handwriting pages – Improve letter formation with these printable worksheets and tracing strips. Tracing is one of the easiest ways to improve fine motor skills.

8. Letter G Lacing Activity – Prepare these tracing cards (the letters or the gas pump) so students can follow the uppercase and lowercase letters and sound picture cards’ shape.

5. Letter G Formation Cards – Follow the steps to form each letter. Trace with a dry-erase marker or finger.

7. Letter G Play Dough Mats – Each activity mat includes a template for making the letter or object with playdough and letters to trace with a dry-erase marker.

9. Build The Letter G – Get into construction mode and use the pieces and templates provided to build the uppercase and lowercase letters Letter G.

Letter G Identification Cards

10. Letter G Clip Cards – Includes uppercase and lowercase letter identification and beginning sound pictures. These are hands-on and can be a very interactive activity.

12. Letter G Count and Clip Cards – Count the letter G’s or pictures beginning with G and clip the correct number. Use a simple clothespin or any appropriate clip.

14. Letter G Sorting Activity – Sort the uppercase and lowercase letters into the correct house or jar on the activity mats. Sorting helps kids with basic decision-making skills development.

16. Letter G Dot/Sticker Pages – Use a dot marker or colored circle stickers to fill each picture beginning with the letter G. The completed pictures can be sent home or displayed. Kids love it when their work is appreciated and it makes them confident.

11. Find The Letter G pages – Activity mats where students cover the letter G as they find it or circle with a dry-erase marker. Try to pair students up to make it a social activity.

13. Letter G Color Activity – Match the uppercase and lowercase letters according to color. The chart can also be used to identify the colors and improve color recognition.

15. Highlight and color the letter G – Either color, highlight, trace, or cover the letter g on each activity card. This is. a good activity to provide instructions and see how the kids follow them.

17. Letter G Sticker Page – Write uppercase and lowercase G’s on dot stickers. Students then stick them in the correct spot on the grapes. A way to make the concept stick more is to enjoy some grape flavored snacks like a juice box, fruit or anything you can think of.

Letter G Games, Puzzles & Patterns

18. Letter G Puzzles – Including uppercase and lowercase letters and letter-to-picture puzzles. These are relaxing but also boost the brain.

20. Letter G Spin and Cover/Trace – Place or make a spinner on each circle then cover or trace the uppercase or lowercase letters on the activity mat with each spin.

22. Letter G Dice + Graphing Pages – a) Count the pictures and letters and graph what you find! b) Roll a die and trace the letter corresponding to each number rolled.

19. Letter G Mazes – Cover each letter G or picture that starts with G to find a path through the mazes. Have the kids say the name of each object too.

21. Letter G Patterns – Continue each pattern featuring uppercase and lowercase letters and pictures beginning with G. Pattern identification improves analytical skills.

23. Letter G Alphabet Game – Add a spinner to the circle or use a dice to move on the game board. Read or say what you see where you land. This is such an easy but loved game in my classroom.

Letter G Reading & Letter Sounds

24. Letter G Reading Strips – Read the sentences and either add a tick to the box or add the matching picture. This is an easy way to encourage reading.

26. Letter G Mini Books – Includes a foldable mini book and a flip book featuring pictures and words starting with the letter G. This is also perfect for a homework packet or to send as activities for the kids during the holiday season.

25. Letter G Sound Cards – Place a counter or token under each letter or picture as you read/say it.

Letter G Crafts and Art Activities

27. Uppercase Letter G Craft – Goose – Follow the instructions to cut and paste to create this SILLY GOOSE! Encourage more creativity by using the black and white pages instead of the color versions.

29. Letter G Art Pages – Use any art materials such as watercolors, crayons, tissue paper, etc. to decorate these letter G art pages. Add googly eyes, pom poms and any crafty bits you have.

31. Letter G Hats – Cut out, color the pictures, trace the letters, and then join to make a Letter G hat! Two variations are included.

33. Letter G Dot Marker Pages – Printable pages to dot the letter Gs or complete the G pictures by filling in the dots. This is a great way to improve visual discrimination.

28. Lowercase Letter G Craft Goat – Cut the pieces and paste them onto the base page to create a goat in the shape of a lowercase letter g!

30. Letter G Watch + Bookmark – Color the pictures and trace the letter G on the bookmark and watch. It’s a cute accessory and a physical reminder of the letter G!

32. Letter G Cotton Bud Painting – Use a cotton bud dipped in paint to complete the letters and the pictures. You can also do finger painting.

Letter G Worksheets

These worksheets target handwriting, letter sounds, fine motor skills, identifying letters, and more. As the holiday season approaches, these are a lifesaver at home or in the classroom. Prep them ahead of time and you’ll be set!

You can find all of our alphabet activities for kids here.

Find our recommended printable activity supplies here.

NOW for the best part…

Free Letter G Activities Pack

This free sampler from our Letter G worksheets and activities pack is jam-packed with fun and educational worksheets, clip cards and activities that are suitable for young children ages 3-6. It focuses on the letter g, letter g words and letter g sounds.

Letter G Activities

This learning pack focuses on the seventh letter of the alphabet, the letter G. All of these printable activities revolve around both the uppercase and lowercase of the letter g, using the letter g words list: goat, gorilla, garden, game, giraffe, gloves, gift, gate and grapes. There are some simple letter g activities for toddlers as well as tougher ones for preschoolers and kindergarteners.

This Letter G worksheets pack contains over 80 pages and includes the following activities:

Letter g art activities and hands on learning activities

Letter g literacy activities like trace the letter g, cut and paste and see and stamp.

$how to teach the letter g$

Letter g math themed activities

Letter g worksheets
Letter g coloring pages
Letter Mazes
Shade and Cut Pages
Color matching cards
Shade the Picture page

Check out the hands on letter a activities post to see how to use these activities.

To see how I use the fingerprint , push pin and play dough activity check out this post.

Letter G Crafts

Pictures that start with the letter g

If you are looking for a great reading program, I highly recommend the All About Reading program .

GET THE FREE LETTER G ACTIVITIES HERE

Free printable letter g activities, worksheets, crafts and learning pack.

GET THE FULL LETTER G PACK HERE

Get the letter g activity pack here.

SAVE BIG WITH THE BUNDLES

If you would like to use these printable packs in your classroom or to get all letter packs A through Z on one page, you can purchase it through here . This includes all the activity packs in color AND in black and white.

GET THE LETTER WHOLE LETTER A-Z ACTIVITY PACK HERE

Also Included In These Bundles – HUGE SAVINGS

Get the Alphabet Starter Pack here.

Get the Alphabet Collection VIP Pack here.

Letter G song

Check out this song from ABC Mouse. If you like the video and want to do more activities then you can get a free trial at ABC Mouse here. We love it!

More A-Z Alphabet Printables:

Letter B Activities Pack
Letter C Activities Pack
Letter D Activities Pack
Letter E Activities Pack
Letter F Activities Pack
Letter G Activities Pack
Letter H Activities Pack
Letter I Activities Pack
Letter J Activities Pack
Letter K Activities Pack
Letter L Activities Pack
Letter M Activities Pack
Letter N Activities Pack
Letter O Activities Pack
Letter P Activities Pack
Letter Q Activities Pack
Letter R Activities Pack
Letter S Activities Pack
Letter T Activities Pack
Letter U Activities Pack
Letter V Activities Pack
Letter W Activities Pack
Letter X Activities Pack
Letter Y Activities Pack
Letter Z Activities Pack

Muneebah is a proud woman in STEM. When she's not in the lab, she loves exploring the world of literature and early childhood education and development.

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Omsk Oblast
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Places - Siberia and the Russian Far East

OMSK, NOVOSIBIRSK, TOMSK AND THE VASYUGAN MARSHES: HEART OF WESTERN SIBERIA

Western siberia.

Western Siberia has traditionally been defined as the area of land between the Ural Mountains and the Yenisei River. Much of it lies on the West Siberian Plain which is lower and slightly warmer than the higher Central Siberia Plain.

The forests are dominated by pine, spruce and fir. The hardier larch dominates on other side of the Yenisey. The large industrial cities of Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kransoyarsk are on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Some of the most interesting area are in the Republic of Altay and Tuva near the Mongolian border.

Western Siberia is also quite swampy and has a lot of mosquitos. Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker, “ The country’s swampiness did not manifest itself in great expanses of water with reeds and trees in it, like the Florida Everglades. There were wide rivers and reedy places, but also birch groves and hills and yellow fields. The way you could tell you were in the swamp was, first, that the ground became impassably soggy if you walked at all far in any direction; and, second, by the mosquitoes....Western Siberia has the largest swamps in the world. In much of Siberia, the land doesn’t do much of anything besides gradually sag northward to the Arctic. The rivers of western Siberia flow so slowly that they hardly seem to move at all.” [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010)]

On driving through the region, Frazier wrote: “Beyond Yekaterinburg, the road lay straight through grain fields like Nebraska’s or Iowa’s, and the sky unfolded itself majestically outward and higher. Vistas kept appearing until the eye hardly knew what to do with them—dark-green tree lines converging at a distant yellow corner of the fields, and the lower trunks of a birch grove black as a bar code against a sunny meadow behind them, and the luminous yellows and greens of vegetables in baskets along the road, and grimy trucks with only their license numbers wiped clean, their black diesel smoke unravelling behind them across the sky.

“And everywhere the absence of fences. I couldn’t get over that. In America, almost all open country is fenced, and your eye automatically uses fence lines for reference the way a hand feels for a bannister. Here the only fenced places were the gardens in the villages and the little paddocks for animals. Also, here the road signs were fewer and had almost no bullet holes. This oddity stood out even more because the stop signs, for some reason, were exactly the same as stop signs in America: octagonal, red, and with the word “stop” on them in big white English letters. Any stop sign in such a rural place in America (let alone a stop sign written in a foreign language) would likely have a few bullet holes.”

OMSK OBLAST

Omsk Oblast covers 139,700 square kilometers (53,900 square miles), is home to about two million people and has a population density of 14 people per square kilometer. About 72 percent of the population live in urban areas.The city of Omsk is the capital and largest city, with about 1.15 million people. Omsk Oblast is home to more than 20 game reserves and attracts many people into hunting and fishing. For those interested in history, there are ancient settlements and villages, burial mounds, religious monuments and tombs and the historical sites of Chudskaya Mountain and Batakovo Tract, Website: Tourism Portal of the Omsk Region: omsk-turinfo.com

Some come to Omsk Oblast looking for Kolchak's gold. Others follow in the footsteps of the Decembrists, while others still come to see the prison camp where Dostoevsky spent several years. The climate here is sharply continental: with a warm and even hot summer, a cold long winter with the snow remaining on the ground a long time without melting. In the winter temperatures often reach -25 to -30°C; in the summer the average temperature is around 20°C. But the Siberian climate is unpredictable here and sometimes it warms up in the winter or cool spell shows up in the summer. The weather is very changeable in the winter and autumn.

Getting There: Aeroflot, Pobeda, Ural Airlines, Nordwind, and S7 airlines fly to Omsk daily from all Moscow. From St. Petersburg, one flight per day is operated by Rossiya Airlines. A one way tickets costs from 3,000 rubles. Regional traffic is developing. You can get to Omsk by direct flights from Kazan, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Samara, Sochi, Irkutsk, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Surgut, Salekhard, Khanty-Mansiysk, and Novy Urengoy. Regular flights with AirAstana are also available to Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan. By Train: Omsk is conveniently located for rail travel. The station is just outside the city center and all the main sights. A third class ticket from Moscow starts from 2,500 rubles; in second class, from 3,000 rubles. Transport in the Region: You can reach all districts of the region by buses and minibuses from the bus station; however, in certain directions, they leave from the railway station. The schedule, prices and tickets are available online: omskoblauto.ru

Omsk City (kilometer 2716 on the Trans-Siberian Railway) is an industrial city of 1.15 million people. The capital and largest city of Omsk Oblast, it is us where Dostoevsky did four years of hard labor from 1849 to 1854 and was periodically flogged. He wrote about is experienced in Buried Alive in Siberia. There is not much to see. Omsk is home to a large tank factory, a model pig farm. The Pushkin State Scientific Library contains the world’s smallest book. People can read a collection of poems through a microscope.

Omsk lies in the southern part of Western Siberia, at the confluence of the Irtysh and Om rivers, where a Cossack detachment led by Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Buchholtz landed and founded a fortress in 1716. The Omsk area was populated even before Christ and contains many settlements, burial grounds, and encampments, which date to between the 6th millennium B.C. and the A.D. 13th century. Omsk received the status of the town in 1782 and for a while after the 1917-1918 revolution was capital of White Russia. Today, the city stretches for 40 kilometers along the Irtysh River and lies on both banks of the river which is crossed by many bridges. Omski is named after the Om river. In the Siberian Tatarian language, “om” means “quiet”.

Omsk is one of the largest cities in West-Siberia and large transport hub at the intersection of air, river, rail, automobile, and pipeline transport lines. The Irtysh River, a key transport, waterway, and the Trans-Siberian Railway were key to the city's development. Currently, Omsk is the largest industrial, scientific, and cultural center of West Siberia with a high social, scientific, and manufacturing potential. Here, more than 40 organizations, including the Omsk Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are engaged in research and development.

Omsk at one time was regarded as the greenest city in Russia and the theater capital of Siberia. It is the birthplace of the artist Mikhail Vrubel and the famous General Dmitry Karbyshev. City transport in Omsk includes buses, trolleybuses, trams, and minibuses. Transportation is regular up to 8:00-9:00pm.

On his brief encounter with Omsk, Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “ The next days took us to and through the city of Omsk. I had been to Omsk twice before, but only at the airport. This city presented the usual row on row of crumbling high-rise apartment buildings, tall roadside weeds, smoky traffic, and blowing dust. For a moment, we passed an oasis scene—a crowded beach beside the Irtysh River, kids running into the water and splashing—before the urban grittiness resumed. Solzhenitsyn wrote in “The Gulag Archipelago” that he spent time in an ancient prison in Omsk that had once held Dostoyevsky, and that the prison’s three-meter-thick stone walls and vaulted ceilings resembled a dungeon in a movie. I had wanted to explore Omsk looking for this prison, but forgot that idea entirely in our collective eagerness to get out of Omsk. We stopped just to buy groceries, then sped on. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 10 and 17, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010)]

Sights in Omsk City

Sights in Omsk include the preserved house of K. A. Batyushkin, where, during the Civil War, the apartment of Admiral A. V. Kolchak was situated. The building is now occupied by the Supreme Governor of Russia. During the Russian Civil War in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Omsk was the home of three governments: 1) the Provisional Siberian Government, 2) the Provisional All-Russian Government, and the 3) Russian Government of the Supreme Governor. The are many structures left from this period when Omsk was a stronghold of the “White Guard Russia”.

Dostoevsky Literary Museum is located in the city’s historical center, in one of the oldest buildings of Omsk, constructed in 1799. Fyodor Dostoevsky, convicted of participating in the Petrashevsky circle (a group of progressive-minded intellectuals imprisoned for challenging the tsarist government), spent four years at prison camp in Omsk. Many future novels, including Crime and Punishment, were based at least in some parts on his impressions and experience while in Omsk. The museum boasts an excellent, well-thought-out exhibition dedicated to the writer, and in the basement, a reconstructed 19th century prison cell is found. You can go down there and get a taste of the hard life the prisoners of the Omsk fortress used to live, even try on the shackles.The museum occupies a building of historical importance: the Commandant’s of the Omsk Fortress House (built 1799). This house was visited by F.M. Dostoevsky. In 2006, new exhibitions — “Dostoevsky and Siberia” and “Writers of Omsk” — were opened.

Lubinsky Avenue is the main street of the city’s historical center. Here you can find and an ensemble of architectural landmarks dating back to the late 19th-early 20th centuries. All of Omsk most prominent building are found here: the Omsk Academic Drama Theater, the Jubilee Bridge over the Om, the Cadet Corps, the Concert Hall, the St. Nicholas Cossack Cathedral, the Organ Hall, the Vrubel Museum of Art, and the Hermitage-Siberia Center.

Tarsky District became a place of exile soon after the city was founded in the 18th century. The first exiled people were peasants, artisans, delinquent riflemen, tradespeople, Lithuanian war prisoners and Poles. Many of the exiles remained in Omsk after they served their time because they had nowhere else to go. Today descendants of these exiles still live here and national dishes from the exile’s places of origin can be found. Bobrovka is a place where you can try Latvian cuisine. The Latvians have been living in this village since the 19th century. However, they were not exiles, they moved there voluntarily during the Stolypin reform.

Omsk Fortress

Omsk fortress was erected in stages during the 18th-19th centuries to protect the southern borders from nomadic raids. Back in the days when Siberia was like the American Wild West, the barracks of the regiments that participated in the Patriotic War of 1812 stood there. Several surviving structures are concentrated in the fortress: the artillery store, engineering shop, treasury, Tobolsk and Irtysh gates, arsenal, kitchen/mess hall, and the Resurrection cathedral. some of them were restored in time for the city’s 300th anniversary.

History of Omsk started with the construction of the first Omsk fortress on the left bank the Om River. Peter the Great issued a decree in 1714 for Russian military forces to go deep into Siberia to find a "sandy gold" in Erkete. The man in charge of the expedition was Lieutenant Colonel Ivan D. Buchholz. After an unsuccessful campaign in 1716 two small redoubts were built at the mouth of the Om river to protect the military unit and its equipment. Then the first Omsk fortress was built in 1717. It was made of wood and covered an area of approximately six hectares. Castle defenses consisted of a three-meter-deep moat and a one-meter-high outer rampart. The main walls were comprised of 3.5-meter-high palisades dug deeply into the ground and made of tightly-placed-together birch logs. In the corners of the fortress were bastions on which the cannons and guns were positioned.

By the middle of the 18th century Omsk fortress was the focal point of the system of fortifications of the Upper-Irtysh, and later - Presnogorkoy line. However, despite the reconstruction and repair work, the fort gradually became obsolete and no longer meet the military requirements of the time. In the 1768 construction of a fortress began on the right bank of the Om. The fortress was one of the largest military facilities in the East and had a polygon plan enclosing an area of over 30 hectares. It had four bastions, three polubastiona and four gates: Omsk, Tara, Tobolsk and Irtysh. In the historical part of Omsk Tobolsk Gate survives. In 1991 Tara gate was restored and has become a kind of symbol of the city.

A distinctive feature of the new Omsk fortress were its stone structures. The first stone building, built in the fortress is now the oldest in the city. The first stone construction of Omsk was Resurrection Cathedral, founded in 1764 and built by the brothers Cherepanov. In 1920s, the church was closed by the Communists. In 1958 it was demolished.

Structures in the new Omsk fortress included a guardhouse building, which housed the commandant's staff, the fortress guards and garrisons (later Asian) school. Later a Lutheran church, topped by a wooden turret with a clock and a bell was built. At the end of the 18th century the fortress had of the parade ground, around which the architectural ensemble was situated. Among the buildings that have survived and have undergone restructuring and reconstruction, are the guardhouse building, the commandant's house (containing the Fyodor Dostoevsky Literary Museum) and the Lutheran Church (housing the ATC Museum) . All of these have been granted the status of historical and architectural monuments.

These days, buildings in the fortress house museums, art salons, workshops and exhibition spaces that host film screenings and performance and offices for staff of the historical and cultural complex. Six guided tours for groups and individual visitors are offered. Entrance to the fortress grounds is free, while a tour costs 100 rubles. A workshop where visitors can try their hand at weaving a belt with Russian spiritual pattern can be ordered for groups of 5 to 10 people. The cost is 1,000 rubles per group.

Arkhangelsk Sorority of the Holy Mother and St. Michael (60 kilometers southeast of Omsk) was founded near the Cossack village of Achair in 1905. In the late 1920s, like many monasteries, convents and churches it was closed and largely destroyed. In the 1930s, its territory became a penal colony for political prisoners and criminals, who were taken there by barges and wagons. The colony was designed for 800 to 900 people. The living conditions in the colony were very difficult: unheated barracks with very thin walls and floors, light clothes, thin cotton blankets in the -40 degree C Siberian cold. From 1938 to 1953, only one person managed to successfully escape.

A few days after Stalin's death, the colony was dissolved. Many documents were immediately destroyed and what remained of the monastery was blown up. In 1991, Theodosius, the Archbishop of Omsk and Tatarstan, announced the decision to rebuild the ensemble of Achairsky Convent of the Cross in memory of the victims of those times. Vitaliy Meshcheryakov, the director of the Rechnoy animal farm, located near Achair village, alloted 38 hectares for the construction, in memory of his father, who was a prisoner in this horrible colony. Today you can see the new Dormition Cathedral, a wooden summer church for weddings and other structures there.

Traveling Eastward from Omsk

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “A day beyond Omsk, the vastness of the Barabinsk Steppe stretched before us. For hours at a time, the land was so empty and unmarked that it was almost possible to imagine we weren’t moving at all, and I often had trouble staying awake. Lenin himself had declared this a land “with a great future,” but what I saw resembled more the blankness of eternity. And yet it was not like other flat places I’ve seen. The Great Plains of America tend to undulate more than this steppe does, and when the Plains are flat-flat, as in southwest Texas, they’re also near-desert hardpan with only stunted brush and trees. On the Barabinsk Steppe, by contrast, stretches of real forest often appeared here and there, intruding into the flatland like the paws of a giant dog asleep just the other side of the horizon. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 10 and 17, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010)]

“The villages now were fewer, and their names seemed to reach new levels of strangeness. In far-apart succession, we went through Klubnika (Strawberry), Sekty (Sects), and Chertokulich (hard to translate, but something like Devil Bread, according to Sergei). In the village of Kargat (meaning unknown, probably a Tatar word), we stopped for a break in the late afternoon. I sat in the van with the window open and my feet up, watching. First, a man went by on a motorcycle with a sidecar. In a few minutes, he passed by going in the other direction, with the sidecar now full of hay. A flock of sparrows burst from a cluster of bushes by the corner of a house with a noise like heavy rain. A moment later, a small hawk hopped from the bushes onto a nearby pile of firewood, looked around, hunched down, and flew off after them.

“A motorcycle again came by with its sidecar full of hay. I looked closely. It was definitely not the same as the previous motorcycle. This motorcycle’s driver was wearing an aviator’s hat with goggles, and the sidecar was blue, not brown. As I considered that, a tall, shapely woman came walking from a long distance up the road. She wore a plain dress and had curly black hair. She passed the van and I smiled at her. She did not smile back. Then a beat-up car lurched into sight towing an even more beat-up car. As the cars came near I saw that they were connected back to front by a loop made of two seat belts buckled to each other. That was the only time I ever saw a Russian use a seat belt for any purpose at all.

Lake Chany and Its Monster

Lake Chany (420 kilometers west of Novosibirsk, 300 kilometers east of Omsk) is one of the biggest lakes in the world, and the third largest in Siberia (after Baikal and Taymyr). The area of the lake exceeds 1,400 square kilometers but has a depth of only two to seven meters. The lake is almost 100 kilometers long and 60 kilometers wide. People living around the lake are convinced a monster lives in the lake. Ssome describe it as a giant lizard, while others claim it to be a giant snake. They say on numerous occasions the beast attacked the local fishermen. The easiest way to get to Lake Chany is by car.

The lake's shores are mostly covered with dense reeds. Chany consists of three lakes connected by canals: Bolshye Chany, Malye Chany, and Yarkul. Water in different parts of the lake has different levels of mineralization. In Malye Chany, where the Kargat River flows in, the water is fresh. In Bolshye Chany, it is subsaline, and in Yarkul, it is saline.

The water's composition provides it with therapeutic properties. Since the water in the lake is moderately saline, it influences the human body positively: it has a calming effect, normalizes a person's general condition, and improves a person's general physical and mental state; it also promotes purification of the body from waste and harmful substances.

The healing effect is provided not only by water, but by the air as well. The wind changes from quiet to strong and the air becomes saturated with evaporated salts and the intense scents of different herbs found on the Baraba steppe.

Lake Chany is a popular place for winter and summer fishing. Sixteen species of fish inhabit the lake: crucian carp, perch, mirror carp, ide, sander, roach, dace, bream, and others. In addition, Lake Chany is great place for birdwatching. Almost 300 species of birds live among its waters. Geese, ducks, swans, herons, cranes and even pelicans nest here. It is also home to one of the largest colonies of the common gull.

Water in the lake freezes in the second half of October or the first half of November, and unfreezes in May. There are almost 70 islands on the lake. The islands of Cheryomushkin, Kobyliy, Perekopnyi, Bekarev, Kalinova, Chinyaiha, Shipyagin, Kruglyi, Kolotov, Kamyshnyi are natural monuments and preserve unique landscapes containing rare spices of plants and animals.

NOVOSIBIRSK OBLAST

Novosibirsk Oblast covers 178,200 square kilometers (68,800 square miles), is home to about 2.8 million people and has a population density of 15 people per square kilometer. About 77 percent of the population live in urban areas. The city of Novosibirsk is the capital and largest city, with about 1.6 million people, or about 57 percent of the oblast’s population. Novosibirsk Oblast is located in the south of the West Siberian Plain between the Ob and Irtysh Rivers. The oblast borders Omsk Oblast in the west, Tomsk Oblast in the north, Kemerovo Oblast in the east, and Altai Krai and Kazakhstan in the south. The oblast extends for more than 600 kilometers (370 miles) from west to east, and for over 400 kilometers (250 miles) from north to south. The oblast is mainly plains and steppes in the south with huge expanses of forests and marshes in the north. The landscape starts its transition to a low mountain relief at Salair ridge. There are many lakes. The largest ones are located in the south. The majority of the rivers belong to the Ob basin, many of them falling into lakes with no outlets. Among the largest lakes are Chany, Sartlan and Ubinskoye.

Although Novosibirsk is the third largest city in Russia, it is not a center for tourism; most visitors come here on business. Nevertheless, there is plenty to see and do in the oblast including ski resorts, Zveroboy cliffs, Barsukovskaya Cave and Lake Karachi. The nature reserves and pine forests are great places to enjoy outdoor sports, walk, look at nature and gather mushrooms and berries. You can learn about the history of the Trans-Siberian Railway at the Museum of Railway Transport and exercise your brain in the city's Academic Town. Travel to the Ordynsky District and find out about the twists and turns of the last battle for Siberia between the Cossacks and the army of Kuchum Khan. Lake Chany is said to be the home of a Loch-Ness-like monster.. You can also visit the Bugrinsky Bridge; climb the Pikhtovy Ridge, the highest point of the region (495 meters) and go boating in vast Ob Sea.

Getting There: A flight from Moscow to Novosibirsk costs RUB 16,000 (adult round-trip ticket) and takes four hours. An economy class round-trip train ticket from Moscow for one adult costs RUB 7,000, and the journey takes from 48 to 55 hours. Novosibirsk is a stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway About ten major train routes from different directions go through Novosibirsk, including Moscow-Vladivostok and Moscow- Beijing. Transport in the Region: Buses from Novosibirsk bus station go to all major cities and districts of Novosibirsk Oblast, as well as many places in nearby regions. A Round-trip bus tickets to Tomsk costs RUB 1,520 per adult; a ticket to Barnaul costs RUB 1,300 (round-trip, per adult);, and a ticket to Kemerovo is RUB 2,000 (round-trip, per adult).

Novosibirsk City

Novosibirsk (kilometer 3343 on the Trans-Siberian Railway) is the largest city in Siberia and the third largest in Russia, with 1.6 million people. Located where the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the mighty Ob River and founded in 1893, it grew into an important city in the 1920s when it became a major transport center and expanded greatly in World War II, when weapons factories were located there out of range of Nazi attacks. More than 50 defense plants were rebuilt in Novosbrink.

An industrial city about halfway between the Urals and Lake Baikal, Novosibirsk is the capital of Novosibirsk oblast, with about 57 percent of the oblast’s population living there. Just over a century ago it was a village with less than 700 people. No other place in Russia has experienced such astounding growth in such a short period of time. Novosibirsk is situated on the Priobskoe plateau near a reservoir, which is officially called Novosibirsk reservoir but is more commonly known as the Ob Sea. The right-bank part of Novosibirsk features many ravines, low ridges, and gullies.

Novosibirsk is a scientific, cultural, industrial, transportation, trade and business center of Siberia. It is the largest industrial center in Siberia, and a rail, river, and air transportation hub. The Siberian branch of the world-famous Academy of Science is located here. The huge railway station of the city, one of the largest in the country, has become a symbol of Novosibirsk, along with the letters on its roof which say: “Novosibirsk the Main”.

History of Novosibirsk

The first Russian settlement in the territory of modern Novosibirsk dates back to the last decade of the 17th century the beginning of Peter the Great's rule. At that time the village Krivoshchekovskaya (“Crooked Cheek”) was set up. It is named after a serviceman from Tomsk, Fyodor Krenitsyn, dubbed Crooked Cheek for the saber scar on his face.

At least until 1712, Krivoshchekovskaya acted as a trade center between the Russians and the Teleuts, who owned the lands on the other side of the Ob River. The settlement in the territory of modern Novosibirsk developed at various rates in different areas. The Russian colonialists preferred to settle on the left bank. By the end of the 18th century, this area was completely populated by Russians as most of the Teleuts had left. A Teleut fortress of one of the tribes and a few tribesmen remained they were subordinate to the Russians. Russian people called them the Chuts and, probably, did not really like them, as they only settled on the left shore.

Novosibirsk was known as Novonikolayevsk when it was formally founded in 1896. It was renamed Novosibirsk in 1925. The became a trade center during the building of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and after it was completed. During World War II entire industrial plants were moved here from area vulnerable to Nazi attacks in the western Soviet Union.

Accommodation in Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk is considered to be the capital of Siberia — naturally, the hotels here also meet the standards of a capital city. For example, the 4-star Doubletree Hilton Novosibirsk offers its visitors a variety of facilities, including a gym, business center, swimming pool, spa, restaurant and a bar, as well as a seven-room conference center. A room with a king size bed goes for RUB 11,000 per night. A Junior Suite with king size bed costs RUB 14,990 per night. The Presidential Suite is RUB 39,750 per night.

If you've arrived here by train you can find the 4-star Marins Park Hotel Novosibirsk just 300 meters away form the station. Standard room with a king-size bed costs RUB 2300 per night. A luxury suite costs RUB 7830 per night. In addition, female visitors might be interested in the hotel's beauty salon, while men can enjoy its snooker and pool club.

Hostels in Novosibirsk: BigBen has rooms for RUB 550 per night and a places in a room with four people in bunk beds for RUB 300 per night; At FunKey Hostel you can stay in a room for four people with bunk beds for RUB 500 per night, room for two people for RUB 1,600 per night.

Sights in Novosibirsk

Novosbirisk is not an old city. It was founded only in 1893. There are not many churches or old buildings and it has a very Soviet atmosphere. And, although Novosibirsk is the third largest city in Russia, it is not a center for tourism; most visitors come here on business. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see or do. Novosbirisk is home of the largest zoo in Russia and a large number of museums and theaters. The city boasts the largest Scientific and Technical Library and the largest railway station in Siberia. Among the places of interesti are a local studies museum, an art gallery, the Russian Institute of Archeology and Ethnography, Alexandre Nevsky Cathedral, recently restored and returning to working status, and the Central Park.

Probably the most famous feature of the city is Academgorodok (“the Academic City”), a place with relatively small area where more than twenty scientific and educational institutions are located. Cafe-club “Under the Integral” of Academgorodok has become one of the symbols of the “Khrushchev thaw”: for example, it is here that Alexander Galich had his only public concert in the U.S.S.R. The Pazyryk lady — one of the greatest archaeological finds in Russia — is (or was) displayed at the Russian Institute of Archeology and Ethnography The central market draws traders from all over Siberia.

Novosibirsk was built according to a preconceived plan, as were its main architectural landmarks. The main street is Krasny Avenue (former Nikolaevskiy Avenue). If the city's opera house seemed huge to you, you are right —it is the largest theater building of the former U.S.S.R. If you are feeling something Parisian in the city's landscape, it means you are walking past the 100-Flat Building (Krasny Prospekt 16). You will find wooden merchant mansions, red-brick houses from the years of Trans-Siberian Railway construction and even an example of the contemporary 21st century architecture — the unusual “walking” building of the Center of Information Technology.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (on Krasny Avenue) is the grandest church in Novosibirsk. It honors honors St. Duke Alexander Nevsky, the 13th century defender of the Russian Land. It is the first city’s stone church and one of the first stone buildings in Novosibirsk, In 1896 Tsar Nicholas II granted a piece of land for the construction of the cathedral and donated 5000 rubles to the cathedral construction and 6500 rubles to the iconostasis. In 1899 Nicholas II gave priest and diacon vestments, made of precious gold brocade, which had covered the coffin of the Grand Duke George Alexandrovich. He also donated to the cathedral icons of the Athos letter: the Iverskaya Icon of the Mother of God and the Icon of the Great-Martyr and Healer Panteleimon.

Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater

The Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater building is the largest theater building in the former Soviet Union. It required complicated architectural techniques to build. The most unique part of the building is its dome, which 60 meters in diameter and 35 meters high but only 8 centimeters thick. This dome was the first in Europe to be constructed without girders or buttresses. The roof of the dome is covered with thousands of silvery tiles that contributes in overall splendid appearance of the Theater. One cannot visit the main square of the city without being delighted with The Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater.

Founded in May 12, 1945, and nicknamed “A Peer of the Victory” (as it opened when World War II was finally ending), the theater has hosted about 350 premieres and capital reconstruction of classical opera and ballet productions since 1945. Classical opera and ballet performances forms the basis of its repertoire but at the same time “The Siberian Coliseum” is at the cutting edge of modern theater life, ready to offer you modern up-to-date performances. The Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater took part in global international projects implemented under the auspices of UNESCO.

The Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater company is (was) so good it has been called the "Bolshoi of Siberia". During foreign tours the ballet and opera company successfully performed such productions as: “The Sleeping Beauty”, “The Nutcracker”, “Swan Lake”, “Spartacus”, “Legend of Love”, “Carmen”, “Boris Godunov”, “Prince Igor”, “Khovanschina”, “Dame Pique”, “Otello”, “Galka”, “Tosca” and many others. The leading opera and ballet soloists are often invited to foreign tours. Some of the performances in Novosibirsk feature foreign or non-company actors and dancers.

Theaters in Novosbirisk

It has been said that Novosbirisk has to keep its large population entertained, especially when you considers what a long winter the city’s residents have to endure, and that is why there are so many theater, opera and ballet companies in the city.

Among the theaters in Novosbirisk are: 1) Novosibirsk Drama Theater Red Torch founded in 1920 in Odessa by a group of young actors and relocated in Novosbirisk in 1932; 2) Novosibirsk City Drama Theater, stringly influenced by its longtime author, founder and artistic director Sergey Afanasiev; 3) Novosibirsk State Drama Theater Old House, whose repertoire is primarily classical texts but also with ultra-modern stagings; 4) Theater La Pushkin, which opened under Oleg Zhukovsky in 1999 in Dresden and came to Novosibirsk in 2013.

Youth and Puppet Theaters include: 1) Novosibirsk Academic Youth Theater Globus, the largest center in Siberia for the aesthetic and spiritual education of children and youth; 2) Novosibirsk Youth Theater Drama, founded in 2008. 3) Novosibirsk Regional Puppet Theater, opened in 1934 and today has a repertoire of more than 25 performances and is often on tour; and 4) Puppet Theater Cdc Them. Stanislavsky, opened in 2011.

Among the music oriented theaters are: 1) the Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater (See Above); and 2) the Novosibirsk Musical Theater, opened in 1959 and now regarded as one of Russia's leading musical

Among the modern and avant garde theaters are Theater A Clockwork Orange, founded in 1997 by a group of leading actors of the academic theaters Red Torch and the Globe; 2) Theater Company Akademgorodok, featuring audience stories that actors create on the spot with no rehearsed roles, or even stage design; 3) Studio Theater The First House, established in 2008 by graduates of Novosibirsk State Theater Institute in 2008; 4) City Drama Theater On the Edge, located on city’s outskirts and found in 2005; and 5) Novosibirsk City Drama Theater On the Left Bank, one of the youngest theater collectives of Novosibirsk; created in 1997.

Museum of Death

The Museum of World Funeral Culture (unofficially known as The Museum of Death), was established by Sergei Yakushkin, the founder of the Novosibirsk crematorium. The museum's collection includes 19th century mourning dresses, hearse models, as well as engravings, paintings, sculptures, photos and postcards depicting death and funerals.

The museum collection numbers more than 1 million items, which are divided into collections on various topics, including the world's largest collection of postcards on the theme of death, which includes copies from the late 19th- early 20th century. There are also death masks, family memorials, exclusive funerary urns, coffins, copies of famous historical figures, paintings, sculptures, photographs, old books, household items and much more.

Of particular interest are: 1) unique mourning outfits from the 19th-20th centuries, which are annually used in the funeral parade of fashion in the museum and outside it; 2) a collection of old prints of famous Russian and foreign engravers; 3) works on the themes of death, mourning ceremonies, funerals of famous people; and 4) funeral carriages and hearses, including classic American ones from the 20th-21st centuries The history of funeral vehicles can be clearly traced back to the exhibits presented in the museum. There are the models made to scale, and actual samples.

Museum of World Funeral Culture is Russia's only museum of this kind. It is located in the Park o Memories of the Novosibirsk crematorium in the village of Sunrise in Novosibirsk region. The museum is part of the International Association of Museums of death and included in the program of conservation of world heritage funeral culture at UNESCO. Many visitors claim this museum has made them appreciate their life more. Address: Sunrise, st. Voentorgovskaya 4/16 Hours: 11:00am to 7:00pm; Closed: Monday; Phones:+7 (383) 363-03-29; + 7-913-712-3709 Entrance ticket prices can be found on the museum's website:musei-smerti.ru.

Novosibirsk Zoo and Aquarium

Novosibirsk Zoo is one said to be the biggest zoo in Russia. Spread over 65 hectares, it is home to home to 11,000 animals and birds in of landscapes ranging from African savannah to Arctic sea ice. About a half of the animal species found here are rare. Among these are tree-dwelling prehensile-tailed porcupines from South America; rusty-spotted cats from Southeast Asia; miniature dik-dik antelopes; and red flamingos. The zoo is open from 9:00am to 7:00pm. The entrance ticket prices are RUB 300 (for an adult ticket) and RUB 150 (for a reduced-fare ticket)

The Center of Oceanography and Marine Biology “Delfinia” is a unique facility for Siberia: a a large-scale aquarium in the middle of an industrial city in the taiga far from the seas and oceans and operates all year round. The halls of the complex cover more than 8000 square meters and its pools, basins and aquariums hold about 2.7 million liters of water. “Delphinia” can accommodate up to 650 spectators at once. It unique dome, which allows natural light in, helping to warm the place even on the coldest days.

Pacific bottlenose dolphins, white beluga whales, belugas, South American sea lions and the Pacific walrus perform for spectators. Also, along with performances of dolphins and sea animals, there is the aquarium with a tunnel that passes through the aquarium. The facility has 28 aquariums. There are more than 300 species of fish and marine animals, such as moray eels, stingrays, sharks and other inhabitants of seas and oceans.

History and Architecture Open Air Museum

Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (near Novosibirsk State University) opened in 1981. The first architectural object was the bell tower of the church from the polar city of Zashiversk, brought to Akademgorodok in 1969 as a result of the Institute expedition. The church itself was transported in 1971. The IAESB of the RAS museum covers the area of 46.5 hectares. Several recreational zones and archaeological, ethnographic, architectural monuments and an experimental site are located on it. Another exhibition is housed in the administrative building.

The central exhibit in the architectural monument area is the masterpiece of Russian wooden architecture, the Church of the Increate Savior from the Zashiverski Ostrog, built by the philistine Andrei Khabarov in 1700. The monument was donated to the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. by the government of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and was transported from the banks of the Indigirka River.

The Yuil (Kazym) jail, a monument to the era of the Siberian development by the Russian population, from the Lower Ob region is partly exhibited on the museum territory. The third architectural object is the peasant household of Russian Eastern Siberia. There's a separate archaeological zone, where stone steles and statues of various eras, from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, are represented. A polygon with the reconstructions of tools and devices for catching animals and hunting is located in the zone as well. The ethnographic zone is a reconstruction of the Mansi family shrine.

In 2012, after the construction of the administrative building, an exhibition dedicated to the culture of the Slavic population of Siberia was opened on the second floor. The commissioning of the administrative building allowed conducting master classes and mass events.

Near Novosibirsk

Travel agencies offers one-day and overnight cross-country ski outings in the region during the winter, picnics during the summer and trips to Russian bathhouse where you get to whack yourself with birch boughs and everything, year round. Novosbirisk is a jumping place for trips in the Altay Mountains, Kazakhstan and Central Asia. The 1,442-kilometer Turkestan-Siberia Railway to Alma Ata branches off here.

Big Horde Ring Tours (70 kilometers southwest of Novosibirsk) are tours organized in Ordynsky District. The Ordynskoye Koltso (The Horde Ring) is a chain of local historical and cultural landmarks that includes: 1) the site of the Battle of Irmen (August 20, 1598), the last battle for Siberia between the Cossacks and the army of Kuchum Khan; 2) the church in the village of Chingis, reconstructed on the site of the original consecrated in 1756, featuring unique murals made of colored clay rather than not with paints. The tours cost RUB 1,500–2,000 per one person.

Akademgorodok

Akademgorodok (32 kilometers south Novosibirsk) means "Academic City". Founded in 1958, it is a former center of military research that attracted the best and brightest scientist from all over Russia and put them to work designing atomic bombs, sophisticated missile systems and other weapons and defensive systems.

During the Soviet era, the scientists enjoyed high salaries and many perks. They came up with grand schemes like using nuclear bombs to dig canals and changing the courses of rivers that "wastefully" flowed into the Arctic Ocean.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Akademgorodok fell on hard times. Scientist suddenly found themselves without wages and goals. Some where paid by the United States to keep from revealing weapons secrets to Iran and Iraq. In the 2000s, the research center was reborn as "Silicon Taiga," the home of 120,000 people and many computer, software and Internet firms.

Akademgorodok is a pleasant place full of terraces and well planned neighborhoods. One of the main gathering places is the "Ob Sea," a 200 square kilometer reservoir that is used for swimming and boating in the summer and skating and fishing in the winter. Thee is also a variety of museums.

Heading East from Novosibirsk

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: ““Ravens and Crows—For weeks as we drove, flocks of ravens and hooded crows remained a constant, ubiquitous in western Siberia no less than in St. Petersburg. The birds are easy to tell apart, because the ravens are all black, the hooded crows black and gray. On the Barabinsk Steppe, both kinds sometimes wheeled in great numbers that vivified the blank sky above the wide-open horizon. Past the city of Novosibirsk, however, it suddenly occurred to me that although I was still seeing ravens, I hadn’t seen any hooded crows for a while. I began keeping a special watch for them, and did see a few stragglers. But after another few hundred kilometers no more hooded crows appeared. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 10 and 17, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“Prisons—Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a prison, but invariably it went by too fast. Prisons cropped up in unexpected places on the outskirts of a city. Suddenly, I’d see a guard in boots carrying a machine gun and standing on a catwalk directly above an exercise yard. But always, it seemed, we were in traffic and couldn’t stop. Outside Novosibirsk, I saw derelict guard towers, tumbledown buildings, and drooping barbed wire in a broad, open place beside the road. Whenever I pointed to such a site, Sergei and Volodya would say, “Military,” without even turning their heads. My ongoing search for prisons did not sit well with either of them. After a while, I decided that pursuing it too much was impolite, and I let it drop for the time being.

“Pigs—Although roaming herds of pigs were occasional in villages in western Siberia, east of Novosibirsk they became more common. Now every village we went through seemed to have big gangs of them. Because the weather was so hot, the pigs had generally been wallowing in a mudhole just before they got up to amble wherever we happened to see them ambling. Evidently, the wallowing technique of some pigs involved lying with just one side of themselves in the mud. This produced two-tone animals—pigs that were half wet, shiny brown mud, and half pink, relatively unsoiled original pig. The effect was striking—sort of harlequin. The other animals that roamed the villages in groups were geese. When a herd of pigs came face to face with a flock of geese, an unholy racket of grunting and gabbling would ensue. I wondered if the villagers ever got tired of the noise. Whether challenging pigs or not, the village geese seemed to gabble and yak and hiss non-stop. The pigs grunted and oinked almost as much, but always at some point the whole herd of pigs would suddenly fall silent, and their megaphone-shaped ears would go up, and for half a minute every pig would listen.

“Birthplace of Volodya—About a half-day past Novosibirsk, we passed close by a town called Yashkino. Seeing it on our road map, Volodya remarked that he had been born there. His mother’s people were originally from this area, he said. His father, a tank officer who had been stationed in the Far East at the end of the war, had met his mother while crossing Siberia on his way back to western Russia. Volodya was still a baby when he and his parents left Yashkino, so he had no memory of it; no relatives he knew of still lived there. He felt no need to go there.

“Cottage Cheese—Called tvorog in Russian, this was a favorite lunch of Volodya’s and Sergei’s. Usually it could be obtained in very fresh supply from the grannies along the road. Sergei and Volodya especially liked their tvorog drenched in smetana (“sour cream”). I got to like it that way, too. Once or twice, we had tvorog so smetanoi not only for lunch but for a snack later in the day. The only drawback to this diet was that it made us smell like babies. And as we were able to bathe only infrequently our basic aroma became that of grownup, dusty, sweaty babies: the summertime smell of Mongols, in other words.

“Talk Radio—There is talk radio in Russia just as in America, and call-in radio shows, and “shock jock” hosts who say outlandish things. Sergei and Volodya enjoyed listening to these shows sometimes. Usually I understood nothing that was said on the radio, except for one time when the host told a joke that Sergei and Volodya both laughed at. I picked out the word “Amerikantsi,” so I knew the joke was about Americans. I asked them to tell me the joke, but they wouldn’t. I kept bugging them, but Sergei said the joke was not important. Finally, when he was off doing something in the campsite, I asked Volodya about the joke again, and he told it to me. The joke was: “Why do American men want to be present when their wives are in childbirth?” Answer: “Because maybe they weren’t present during conception.”

Ob River (flowing northeast of Novosibirsk and Tomsk) is the forth longest river in the world if you include its major tributary the Irtysh River and the seventh longest without it. The westernmost of three great rivers of Asiatic Russia, the Ob is 3,650 kilometers (2,270 miles) long and is an important commercial waterway that transports goods back and forth between the Trans-Siberian Railway and the resource rich regions of northern Siberia. Since it is frozen over half the year activity on the river is concentrated mostly in the summer months. The Ob-Irtysh is over 5570 kilometers (3461 miles) long

The Ob and the Irtysh River begin in the Altay Mountains, a range located near where Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia all come together, and flow northward. Although the Ob and the Irtysh begin at points within a couple of hundred miles of one another the two rivers don't join until the Irytysh has traveled over 1,600 kilometers (1000 miles). Once the two rivers have dropped down out of the highlands the meander lazily through open steppes, then rich farmland, and meet in flat, swampy plains, where the width of river ranges between a half a kilometer and a kilometer and a half. The Ob then passes through fir and spruce forests of West Siberia, then through Arctic tundra before finally emptying into the Kara Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean.

The Ob is one of the great Asiatic Russian rivers (the Yenisei and the Lena are the other two). According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it has the longest estuary (550 miles long and up to 50 miles wide) and is widest river that freezes solid. The mouth of the river on the Arctic Ocean is ice free only a couple of months a year. Huge flood sometimes form in the spring when high waters fed by melting snow and ice meet still frozen section of the river.

The main city on the Ob is Novosibirsk. Parts of the Ob are very polluted and nearly void of life. At the mouth of the river so much land has been degraded by gas exploration that huge chunks of permafrost land have literally melted into the sea. [Source: Robert Paul Jordan, National Geographic, February 1978, ♬]

Traveling on the Ob and Irtysh Rivers

There is a regualr ferry the Ob and Irtysh Rivers that travels between Omsk – Tobolsk – Khanty-Mansiysk – Berezovo and Salekhard (Yamal Nenets Autonomous Region). Omsk and Tobolsk both have train stations on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Khanti-Mansiysk is accessible by bus from Tyumen, which has a train station. After Khanti-Mansiysk you are beyond the road network. As well as the major stops listed on the route above, the boat also stops at plenty of isolated indigenous villages in between them. Salekhard is the only city in the world located exactly on the Arctic Circle.

The name of the ferry is the Rodina. It travels three times a month in June and September and four times a month in July and August. Going from Salekhard to Omsk: Day 1): departs Salekhard at 5:00pm; Dat 2) stops at Berezovo for 30 minutes ay 7:30pm; Day 3) stops at Oktobraskaya Market for one hour. Day 4) stops at Khanty-Mansiysk for two hours at 8:00am; Day 6) one hour stop in Tobolsk at 7:30. Day 9) arrive in Omsk at 3:00pm. Traveling the other direction, with the current, takes one third less time.

On the Salekhard - Tobolsk - Omsk trip on person posted on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum in 2013: “I'll start by saying that this boat is amazingly good value for money. Here some example prices. The first is for beds in the common area, similar to platzkart on the train, the second is for a bed in a private 4-, 6-, or 8 bed cabin and the third is for a bed in a private 2 bed cabin. 1) Salekhard - Omsk (8 days): 1162 / 1437 / 3926 roubles; 2) Salekhard - Tobolsk (5 days): 774 / 969 / 2632 roubles; 3) Tobolsk - Khanty-Mansiysk (2 days): 429 / 526 / 1394 roubles. Children go half price!

“Tickets can be bought in advance at the airport in Salekhard or on the boat itself an hour before departure (it's apparently never full). Most people get off at one of the stops in the first 24 hours when going south from Salekhard, leaving only one or two people in most of the cabins for most of the route. The beds are comfortable , both longer and wider than on trains. Everything is cleaned several times a day, there's a shower, laundry, restaurant with simple but tasty meals and alcohol. Breakfast about 70 roubles, lunch and dinner 150 - 300, beer 50 - 80, wine, vodka and so on also available. Theres also a small room where films are shown starting in the afternoon and a shop selling all sorts of useful stuff such as toiletries, mugs, books.

“You can walk around on deck as much as you want or sit and read a book on the benches up there. The scenery is more or less the same all the way - endless taiga forest with absolutely no sign of civilisation. There are a few villages such as Pitlyar for which the boat is their only access to the outside world and a couple of towns where you can get off the boat and walk around - Beryozovo 24 hours after Salekhard and Khanty-Manskiysk 3 days from Salekhard. From Khanty Mansiysk there are regular buses to Tyumen on the Trans Siberian which take 8 hours. At Tobolsk the boat stops next to the stunning kremlin, the only one in Siberia.

“Anyone can freely sail the whole route between Omsk and Pitlyar, a small village of 500 and the last stop before Salekhard. Salekhard and areas north are closed to outsiders, Russian or otherwise, unless they get a temporary permit. See the Yamal Peninsula link in my signature line for how to get this permit. Permit in hand, you can continue the journey north from Salekhard a further two days to Antipayuta, well beyond the Arctic Circle, with a similar level of comfort and price.

“It sails the whole route from June to September and once in October from Khanty-Mansiysk to Omsk. Check www.irsc.ru for timetables and fares. Only about half the boats from Salekhard go as far as Omsk, the rest stopping in Tobolsk. Eg in July and August, the most frequent sailing months, 6 boats go from Salekhard - Tobolsk each month but only 3 continue to Omsk. Check the timetable carefully when planning if you want to sail all the way to Omsk!”

TOMSK OBLAST

Tomsk Oblast is situated in the heart of Western Siberia and, some say, is the best place to experience real Siberian nature: the endless taiga forests, rivers, lakes and swamps. It covers 316,900 square kilometers (122,400 square miles), is home to about 1 million people and has a population density of only 3.3 people per square kilometer. About 70 percent of the population live in urban areas. The city of Tomsk is the capital and largest city, with about 525,000 people. Website: The Tourist Portal of Tomsk Oblast: travel-tomsk.ru

Attractions include unique museums, fun festivals, fishing, hunting, and folk crafts. The region has a rich intellectual tradition: Tomsk contains the oldest university in Siberia. If you have the time take a flight to the remote, isolated towns of Strezhevoy and Kedrovy to see the unusual lifestyle of the people there. For adventure head off into the taiga or penetrate the Vasyugan marshes. Pine nuts are the oblast’s symbol. There are many fine examples of Siberian wooden architecture.

Getting There: A round-trip air ticket from Moscow to Tomsk costs about RUB 23,000. The travel time is 4 hours 30 minutes. A branch off the Trans-Siberian Railway reaches Tomsk. A ticket for express train No. 038N from Moscow to Tomsk will run you RUB 11,000 for a round trip in third class. The one-way travel time is 54 hours 40 minutes. When flying from Saint-Petersburg to Tomsk, you will have to make a transfer in Moscow. The travel time is seven and a half to eight hours. A round trip costs you ca. RUB 30,000. If you decided to take a train from St. Petersburg, you’ll need to transfer in Moscow, Novosibirsk or Vladimir. A third class round trip ticket will set you back about RUB 15,000. The travel time is up to 60 hours.

Transport in the Region: Some of the districts of the Tomsk region are in remote areas, accessible only by air or water. Tomsk airport offers flights to the towns of Strezhevoy and Kedrovy. The historic village of Narym, known from 1598, can be reached by water in the summer, on a snow road in the winter, or by air in autumn and spring.

Tomsk (170 miles northeast of Novosibirsk, kilometers 3771 on the Trans-Siberian at Taiga is where you catch the branch line to Tomsk) is one of Siberia's oldest cities. Founded in 1604, it went into decline when it was by bypassed by the Trans-Siberian Railway, but was later reborn as a nuclear research facility. The city and oblast is named after the Tom River which flows through the city.

Tomsk is the capital and largest city ot Tomsk oblast , with about 525,000 people. It is home to several universities, an active academic community and many old wooden houses. There is a fine arts and local studies museum, a botanical garden, a Polish cathedral and the SS Peter and Paul Cathedral.

Tomsk is regarded as the educational, scientific and entrepreneurial center of Siberia, and also maintains the title of historic city. More than 100 monuments of wooden architecture of the 18th-19th centuries are preserved here, more than 700 houses are included in the program of preservation of a unique architectural landscape. At the same time, a special technical and innovation type economic zone operates in Tomsk. Large scientific forums and conferences are regularly held here.

Accommodation: There is a wide range of hotels to suite a range of tastes and budgets.The Scandinavia four-star hotel at Mikushina street, 12, boasts excellent location and rooms from a basic single standard (RUB 3,325 a night) to luxury (RUB 9,025). The hotel has a restaurant and a laundry room. Transfers are available for visitors on arrival or departure. Guided tours can be booked in the hotel with English-speaking guides available. The Gogol Hotel at Gogol street, 36A is a small hotel with only 24 rooms in downtown Tomsk. The prices range from RUB 3,600 for a basic room to RUB 8,000 for a premium suite. The hotel boasts a sauna, a Turkish bath and a steam room. Hostel prices in Tomsk begin from 480 rubles, although the amenities will naturally be very basic at this rate. Apartments can be rented from 1,500 rubles per day.

History of Tomsk

The history of the city of Tomsk begins in 1604, with Tsar Boris Godunov giving the order “to put the city in a strong place”. In the spring of 1604 the Cossacks, led by V. Tyrkov and G. Pisemsky, arrived on the territory of present-day Tomsk with the order to establish a military fortress and settlement here. It was decided to put a prison on the right bank of the Tom river, as this place was protected on its three sides by nature: by bogs, a river and a steep precipice. The ledge, on which the prison was placed, was later called the Resurrection Mountain. In the 17th century, Tomsk was the most important strategic military center of Siberia and withstood attacks by nomads and hostile tribes.

In the 18th century, the borders of the Russian state moved closer to the north and east, the nomadic raids ceased and Tomsk lost its importance as the military center of Siberia. From the middle of the 18th century, Tomsk became a place of exiles. Many streets in Tomsk are named after the exiles: the disgraced writer A.N. Radishchev, Decembrist G.N. Batenkov, and the ideologist of anarchist M.A. Bakunin.

After 1804, when Tomsk was chosen as the administrative center of the new province, the first stone buildings began to appear, churches were built, and an administrative center of the city was formed. Around this time more than 25,000 people lived in Tomsk. From the middle of the 19th century, Tomsk began to grow and develop rapidly. Thanks to the gold mines discovered in the Tomsk area, many hotels, shops, and, along with them, mansions of wealthy merchants, were built. By the 19th century, Tomsk, was a major trade center, a role that was affirmed when a railway line reached the city in 1896.

In 1888, Siberia Imperial Tomsk University (now Tomsk State University) opened in Tomsk, which still attracts thousands of students throughout Russia and the CIS countries. The first technical university in Trans-Urals, now known as the Tomsk Polytechnic University, opened soon afterwards. Around this time the first theater was organized, three public libraries opened and the Department of the Russian Musical Society was launched. Tomsk suffered during the period of the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War. Afterwards it went decline as began moving to the fast-growing Novosibirsk.

During World War II, about 30 enterprises were transferred from the European part of Russia to Tomsk, which kicked off the city’s industrial development. After the war, the city got a second wind. In the 1960s, Tomsk industry begins to grow and the city became a major scientific center and attention was paid to the architecture of the city.

Tomsk, Nuclear Weapons and Contamination

In the Cold War era, Tomsk was a secret city. It was one of the main nuclear weapons sites in the Urals and Siberia. Plutonium production and weapons-grade uranium enrichment and processing was carried out there. It is considered one of the three most potentially dangerous nuclear sites in Russia.

Nuclear reactors used to create weapons-grade plutonium outside Tomsk were connected to the city by four steel pipes, each 4 feet in diameter, that carried steam from the reactors 19 miles away to heat apartments and homes in the nine-month winter. The city depended on the reactors for about a forth of its heat.

In 1993, a 9,246-gallon tank full of plutonium and uranium exploded at the Tomsk-7 nuclear installation. A northwest wind blew radioactive material to nearby villages and towns. After the disaster radioactive material began being injected into the earth

Sights in Tomsk

In Tomsk, be sure to take a walk through the old city, among the red-brick merchant mansions and wooden houses adorned with lacy carving. After that maybe check out the university areas. Tomsk, a small city compared to, say, Moscow, has ten large higher education institutions. As a result, a quarter of the locals are students. Every year university graduates cover the boots of the monument to Sergei Kirov in bright paint, scarlet or yellow. Back in his day, the famous revolutionary studied at the local university, also engaging in clandestine activities under the “Serge” alias. In 2016, Kirov was painted to resemble Superman with his red boots and blue overalls.

Tomsk is a city with a great sense of humor. Only here you can find a monument to the Lover, a fat man in baggy underwear clinging onto a window sill of the house on Bakunin street, 3. On the quay another well-known monument shows Chekhov drunk in a ditch. Why is Tomsk’s Chekhov depicted like that? Ask the locals when you’re in Tomsk. On Shevchenko, 19/1, you can find a bronze caste of the Wolf who muttered: “Gonna sing now!”

Tomsk Regional Art Museum contains paintings by famous Russian and Soviet masters such as Orest Kiprensky, Valentin Serov, Vasily Tropinin, Boris Kustodiev, and Georgy Choros-Gurkin as well as European art with masterpieces by such artists as David Teners, Jr. (17th century) and a collection of icons from different eras starting with 17th century.

Mansion of the Merchant Golovanov (intersection of Soldier (now Krasnoarmeyskaya) and Yarlykovskoy (now Kartashov)) is surrounded by towering pine trees and has a octagonal tower with a spire topped with a tent. Also known as the Russian-German House and built in 1902, it is the former house of the Tomsk merchant G.M. Golovanov,. The facades have decorative elements that bring to mind smooth terrain forms of different conifers and deciduous trees. And this blends with the silhouette of the main tent and the surrounding firs and pines.

“2+Ku” (Two plus Dolls) is the name of the theater, conceived and created by Vladimir Zakharov, a Tomsk master puppeteer who helped adults and children alike explore the real world through a fairy tale. In 2004, for the 400th anniversary of Tomsk, the theater — also known as the Theater of Living Dolls — moved into its own building, a wooden house resembling a fairy tale outside and inside. In 2019, Zakharov died in a fire. But the theater is still active. These days, its repertoire consists of twelve plays for children and adults.

NKVD Museum

Tomsk Memorial NKVD Prison Museum is housed in the former prison of the Tomsk Municipal Department of the Joint State Political Directorate-NKVD. The building was constructed in 1864-1866. From 1923 to 1944, it basements housed the internal prison of the Tomsk OGPU-NKVD department

Established in 1989, the Tomsk Memorial NKVD Prison Museum was the first museum of the history of political repressions to appear in the post-Soviet landscape. It’s aim is keeping the memory of the many thousands of people who were held here against their will. The former prison courtyard is now Remembrance Square, with memorials to repressed Kalmyks, Poles, Estonians and Latvians. The museum is not for the faint of heart. Still, you should visit. If for nothing else but to understand what suppression of reason and hope that everything will eventually work itself out entail.

The permanent exhibition of the museum includes a renovated jail corridor, a detainee cell, and the interior of an investigator's office. In the four halls of the museum (former cells), the permanent exhibitions are arranged: The Chronicle of Repressions in Tomsk region; the Great Terror; Execution Quest; Kolpashevsky Yar; and The Gulag and Narym krai Settlers. The halls also contain stands with biographical materials and copies of documents of poet N.A. Klyuev, philosopher and linguist G.G. Shtepp, geologist and soil scientist R.S. Ilyin, duke meters.M. Dolgorukov, and others.

Among the exhibits are original documents, copies of investigation files, letters and notes from prisons, personal belongings of repressed Tomsk oblast citizens, as well as everyday items made by prisoners in prison camps and exile. Nobel Prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the first honorable visitor of the museum. He visited Tomsk in 1994 when returning home from exile. The first exhibition was opened for visitors in 1995.

The museum operates as an interregional Siberian museum and historical resource and information center. It has an electronic database with information about more than 200,000 people who endured the suffering and hardships due to the activities of the Cheka, NKVD troikas, de-kulakization, and mass deportations of peoples in Tomsk oblast.

Adjacent to the building is Memory Square, where there is a monument to the victims of Bolshevik terror in the Tomsk region and other memorials dedicated to repressed peoples: Kalmyks, Poles, Estonians, and Lithuanians. “Memory watches,” requiem concerts, the lighting of memorial candles and other activities take place on the square every year. The Museum and the Square are a single memorial complex that has become one of the most visited sites in Tomsk.

Museum of Wooden Architecture and Okolitsa Park

Museum of Wooden Architecture has a permanent exhibition is dedicated to the architectural decor of Tomsk. Among the exhibits are carved platbands, pilasters, cornices and other fragments. A vast collection of antique joinery tools is also presented. None less impressive are cast iron stoves — in the 19th century, even stove doors were richly decorated with artistic images! The museum also provides bus and walking tours to the historical sites of Tomsk.

Okolitsa Rural Park is the traditional venue for the Axe Feast in Zorkaltsevo village (10 kilometers west of Tomsk). Today Okolitsa has been turned into a veritable open-air museum and is one of the favorite recreation areas for residents of Tomsk.

Throughout the park one can find works made by Axe Feast participants and carpentry craftsmen from all over Russia and many foreign countries: from unusual park sculptures and carved benches to a part of a Cossack dungeon restored according to building traditions of the 17th century and even a real chapel. There is also a whole range of informative and entertaining areas dedicated to the multinational culture of the Tomsk region: a Selkup mini-village, a Tatar farmstead, a Russian druzhina squad camp, and an Uzbek courtyard.

During the warm months. the park operates an extreme rope park and a mini-farm, where various species of domestic and wild animals live, from pot-bellied pigs to elks. A Chinese cultural zone is to be opened in the future. During the Axe Feast, the petting zoo is one of the main attractions. Every weekend, special events are held for families, including competitive games, master classes, and stage performances.

Kemerovo Oblast

Kemerovo Oblast is in Western Siberia, more than four 4 hours by plane to the east of Moscow. Often called the Kuzbass, the region is home to one of the largest coal fields in the world and the main area of coal mining of Russia. Mines and slagheaps are a staple of the local landscape. Among the tourist sights in Kemerovo Oblast are the Dinosaur Graveyard, the first Siberian rock art museum and one of Russia's main ski resorts — Sheregesh. There is a Dostoevsky Museum in the family home of his wife.

Kemerovo Oblast covers 95,500 square kilometers (36,900 square miles), is home to about 2.8 million people and has a population density of 29 people per square kilometer. About 80 percent of the population live in urban areas. The city of Kemerovo is the capital and largest city, with about 530,000 people. Kemerovo Oblast borders Tomsk Oblast to the north, Krasnoyarsk Krai and the Republic of Khakassia to the east, the Altai Republic to the south, and Novosibirsk Oblast and Altai Krai to the west.

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “Until we left Novosibirsk, we had seen none of the large-scale environmental damage that Siberia is famous for. Then we hit the small, smoky city of Kemerovo, in the Kuznetsk Basin coal-mining region. Russians don’t bother to hide strip mines with a screen of trees along the road to spare the feelings of motorists, as we Americans do. Beyond Kemerovo, the whole view at times became the gaping pits themselves, sprawling downward before us on either side while the thread-thin road tiptoed where it could between. Strip mines are strip mines, and I had seen similar scenery in North Dakota and southern Ohio and West Virginia, though never quite so close at hand. Often through this Siberian coal region the road strayed and forgot its original intention, and more than one fork we took dead-ended without warning at a city-size strip-mine hole. We meandered in the Kuznetsk Basin for most of a day and drove until past nightfall in order to camp on the other side. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 10 and 17, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010)]

“After the Kuznetsk Basin came a long interval of meadows. We saw dark-clothed people working the hay fields in big groups as in an old bucolic painting, or riding to or from the work in horse-drawn flatbed wagons whose hard rubber wheels bouncing on the uneven pavement made the flesh of the passengers’ faces jiggle fast. In this more peaceful region, we camped one night on the banks of the Chulym River at a popular spot with a gravel bank more convenient for bathing and washing than the usual swampy mud. While we ate supper, a group of Christians waded in not far from us, some of them in flowing white baptismal clothes. The worshippers sang songs accompanied by a guitar, held hands in a circle, swayed. A man in the middle of the circle took another man and a woman and two girls in his arms and then immersed them one by one.”

Getting There: There are two airports in the region, in Kemerovo and Novokuznetsk. A flight from Moscow to Kemerovo will run you around 24,000 rubles (adult round trip); to Novokuznetsk, 26,000 rubles. There are no direct flights from St. Petersburg. With a transfer in Moscow, the flight to Kemerovo will set you back 30,000 rubles; to Novokuznetsk, 34,000. A train ride from Moscow to Kemerovo costs 11,000 rubles (third class, adult, round trip); from Moscow to Novokuznetsk, 7,400 rubles. Buses run from the neighboring regions to Kemerovo and Novokuznetsk. A ticket from Novosibirsk costs 1,300 rubles (adult, round trip); from Barnaul, 2,300 rubles; from Tomsk, 1,000 rubles. Transport in the Region: Cities and towns in the region are connected by quality roads, so travel by car and bus is possible. A bus transfer from Kemerovo to Novokuznetsk costs 523 rubles; to Mariinsk, 310 rubles; to Prokopievsk, 471 rubles.

Kemerovo City

Kemerovo (150 kilometers east of Novosibirsk) is the capital and second largest city of Kemerovo oblast, with about 530,000 people (Novokuznetsk is the largest city). Kemerovo stretches along the both banks of the Tom River, at the confluence of the Iskitimka River. The city is best known for coal mining, which has been practiced here for more than a hundred years, but has a large chemical industry.

About a third of the population is employed in heavy industry, which leaves a heavy imprint on the city but it also a major educational center. At the beginning of the 20th century, present-day Kemerovo was occupied by the villages of Sheglovka and Kemerovo, which were united in a city called Sheglov in 1918. Later the city was renamed Sheglovsk, and then to Kemerovo in 1932.

There are 126 objects of cultural heritage in Kemerovo. Places of interest include the Kemerovo Regional Museum of Local Lore, the Archeology, Ethnography and the Ecology of Siberia museum, the Church of the Holy Trinity and the main church of Kemerovo is Znamensky Cathedral. There is a monument called In Memory to the Miners of Kuzbass by sculptor Ernst Neizvestny on Krasnaya Gorka; and the Holy Great Martyr Varvara — Patroness of Miners sculptural composition and a monument to Mihailo Volkov, the discoverer of Kuznetsk coal, were erected in the same area nearby. Various military equipment and weapons — including an T-55 tank, BTR-60 armored personnel carrier and BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle — are on display in Park Pobedy.

Accommodation: In Kemerovo, try Kuzbass hotel: rooms from standard (2,200 rubles per day) to three-room suite with a hot tub (8,000 rubles per day) are available there. Conveniently, there is no single billing hour: you pay from the moment you check in. Breakfast, dinner, transfer to the airport or railway station, and registration for foreign citizens are available. Hostels in Kemerovo cost from 700 rubles; apartments, from 1,200 rubles per day.

Near Kemerovo City

Shestakovo Dinosaur Graveyard (200 kilometers from Kemerovo) has been known since 1953, when geologists found the bones of a psittacosaurus in Shestakovsky Yar. There are only two dinosaur cemeteries in Russia: one is Shestakovsky Yar, the other is near the village of Kundur in the Far East. Bones of the Shestakovo dinosaurs can be seen in the Chebula district museum and the Kemerovo regional museum. The cutbank is further washed away by the river every year, so you have the chance to find petrified shells, bones and prehistoric younger artifacts on your own. If that's your kind of thing that worries the soul, this is where you should visit! The distance from Kemerovo to Shestakovsky Yar is

Tomskaya Pisanitsa (50 kilometers northwest from Kemerovo) is Siberia's first rock art monument and museum. There are about 280 images in the ancient natural-historical sanctuary. The earliest paintings date back to the late Neolithic period in the 4th-3rd millennium B.C. and depict elks, bears, anthropomorphic beings, sun signs, birds, and boats. Pictures from the Bronze Age (2nd millennium B.C.) show a deer-sun, masks, and birdmen. Many of the images are masterpieces of primitive art. The unique outdoor museum was established in 1988.

A rock with drawings of ancient people was discovered on the banks of Tom river at the turn of the 16th-17th century. The site has attracted the attention of researchers for centuries. Famous scientists and explorers in the 17th-19th centuries described the paintings in their work. The final stage of this long research effort was the fundamental work of A.P. Okladnikova and A.I. Martynov (Treasures of the Tomsk Pisanitsa, 1972, as well as dozens of articles in scientific journals in the U.S.S.R. and abroad). Science helped contemporaries to understand the meaning of life and worldview of the ancients, but they were unable to protect the monument from natural deterioration and, more importantly, from vandals.

In the 1960-80s, a group of scientists, teachers, and students led by professor Anatoly Martynov campaigned to have the rock drawings protected. Thanks to these people, the first monument restoration was carried out. The famous staircase that is today the main descent to the rock was built, and the first excursions were organized. In 1968, the territory adjacent to the neolithic rupestrian drawings was declared a preserved area.

Tomsk Pisanitsa includes three main exhibition complexes devoted to archaeology, ethnography, and ecology. Ninety percent of the museum-reserve is occupied by pine forest. An ancient elk path leads across the reserve to Tom river crossing, where elk can often be seen. In the winter, wolves and lynxes come to the reserve. A small zoo operates in the Tomsk Pisanitsa Museum-Reserve. It is the only permanent zoo in Kemerovo oblast. There are 16 animal species and 7 bird species in the zoo.

Novokuznetsk

Novokuznetsk (120 kilometers south of Kemerovo) is the largest city in Kemerovo Oblast, just barely, with about 548,000 people. It was previously known as Kuznetsk (until 1931), Stalinsk (until 1961). Novokuznetsk is a heavily industrial city and is located in the heart of the Kuzbass coal-mining region. Factories in the city include: the West-Siberian Metal Plant, Novokuznetsk Iron and Steel Plant, Factory "Kuznetsk ferroalloys" and Novokuznetsk aluminium factory

Novokuznetsk was founded in 1618 by men from Tomsk who set up a a Cossack ostrog (fort) on the Tom River, which was was initially called Kuznetsky ostrog. Fyodor Dostoevsky married his first wife, Maria Isayeva, here in 1857. Joseph Stalin's rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union transformed the sleepy town into a major coal mining and industrial center in the 1930s.

Dostoevsky Museum (in Novokuznetsk) is located in the house where Maria Isayeva lived in a rented apartment. The writer fell in love with her back in Semipalatinsk, but she was married then. Maria Dmitrievna's husband died in Kuznetsk. Dostoevsky came here several times, and in 1857, after his wedding with Maria Dmitrievna, he lived in this house for three weeks. The house itself is the main artifact. However, the exhibits, photos, and paintings create a unique atmosphere, an immersion effect. The street on which the house is located now bears the name of Dostoevsky, but back then it was the Police Street, which can be seen as a grin of fate. Maria Dmitrievna died of tuberculosis in 1864. Literature experts believe that this story of unhappy love is reflected in the Crime and Punishment and Humiliated and Insulted novels.

Kuznetsk Fortress (on the Voznesenskaya Hill in Novokuznetsk) began as a stockade established in 1620. It was built for protection against raids by local tribes, and in early 19th century the stockade was rebuilt into a fortress. It was, however, the time when the attacks had already subsided, so the fortress never had to fight. There's not much left of it after two centuries. The restoration of the fortress as a historical landmark began in the 1990s. These days, the Kuznetsk Fortress museum-reserve includes military fortifications and architectural objects.

Near Novokuznetsk

Sheregesh is famous not only for its world-class ski trails, but also for its spectacular nature, which adds a special charm to the Mountainous Shoria region. In Sheregesh there are many beautiful places and Camel (Verblyuda) Butte is one of them. The buttes in the region, located on the slopes of Kurgan Mountain, were formed by magma withdrawal. They have an interesting shape as a result of the influence of wind, frost, and water. One of the best locations for observing the buttes is from the highest point in the area, Zelenaya Mountain, where most of the ski trails are located. From there it is possible to take a walk or take a snowmobile to the buttes.

Sheregesh Ski Resort is a major ski area with 15 ski trails from 700 meters to 4.2 kilometers in length, and from 120 to 800 meters in elevation. The trails are built for different levels of difficulty, their total length is 42 kilometers. There are 18 ski lifts, from J-bars to gondola ones.

One of the main attractions of Sheregesh ski resort is its unique snow conditions. The season welcomes skiers from the early November until early May, and the thickness of snow cover reaches over two meters. Sheregesh attracts the extreme skiers seeking for “off-piste” rides. Resort facilities include a snowpark with springboards, handrail, fs 314 air bag, a trampoline and an indoboard. Instructors will help both beginners who try downhill skiing for the first time and people who want to master freestyle. There is almost no avalanche danger at the resort because of the presence of many trees on the slopes. Acclimatization is quite easy because the resort is not very high. Sheregesh provides equipment rental centers and accommodation. Other facilities include a bowling center, an indoor ice rink, a tennis court, entertainment centers, and even “the upside down house”, an attraction where all things are fastened to the ceiling for unusual photoshoots.

VASYUGAN MARSHES

The Vasyugan Marshes (north of Omsk, Novosibirsk and Tomsk) is the largest swamp system in the world and the largest peat deposit in the world (more than 1 billion tons). Covering 53,000 square kilometers, an area larger than Switzerland, and formed about 10,000 years, the swamp stretches for 320 kilometers from north to south and 537 kilometers from west to east. The swamp occupies the northern part of the Ob and Irtysh interfluve (a region between the valleys of adjacent watercourses), mostly within Tomsk Oblast and partially Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts. Every year the swamp grows by an average of eight square kilometers due primarily to ice the blocking the flow of the Ob and Irtysh rivers.

The Vasyugan Swamp has called the second “green lungs” of the planet after the Amazon Basin. In 2007, it was included in the Tentative List of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The swamp is the main source of fresh water in the region, with some 800,000 small lakes. The left tributaries of the Ob (Vasyugan, Parabel, Chaya, Shegarka) originate there, as well as the right tributaries of the Irtysh (Om and Tara) and rivers, feeding fishing lakes of the inner basin of Western Siberia.

The nature here has remained completely untouched. Ten percent of the swamp is included in the Vasyuganskiy Regional Nature Reserve (Bakcharsky District). The swamp is home to large shorebirds (curlews and godwits) and a number of rare species of birds. The swamp is the last place the slender-billed curlew — now on the verge of extinction or maybe extinct — was last recorded. Birds such as white-tailed eagles, peregrine falcons, golden eagles, gray shrikes, and falcon all live in the swamp. Sable, squirrels, reindeer, grouse, hazel hen, ptarmigan and wood grouse can all be found here. There is quite a high probability of encountering a moose. The swamp is rich in blueberries, cranberries, and cloudberries.

Kayaking, hiking, skiing, and cycling expeditions are organized in the swamp with the support of the Tomsk branch of the Russian Geographical Society. Among the things you can seek out are vast unspoiled forests and marshes, animals, and abandoned villages. Make sure to bring a strong insect repellent.

See Separate Article VASYUGAN MARSHES factsanddetails.com

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

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Should Preschoolers Have Homework?
Pressure & Stress: In a 2012 article " Should Preschoolers Have Homework?", New York Times journalist Holly Korby did a survey of parents whose preschoolers were being assigned homework. Overwhelmingly, they all reported that the main change that homework made on their households was an increase in stress for everyone.
Free Preschool & Kindergarten Worksheets
K5 Learning offers free worksheets, flashcards and inexpensive workbooks for kids in kindergarten to grade 5. Become a member to access additional content and skip ads. Math, language arts science and other activities, including letters and the alphabet, handwriting, numbers, counting, shapes, sizes, patterns, opposites, before/after, above ...
Homework for Pre-K and Kindergarten
Homework in Preschool and Kindergarten. Homework from vanessa on Vimeo. Preschool Homework. To do or not to do, that is the question! The topic of homework for young children is one that is fiercely debated in the field of early childhood education. Many parents and administrators are all for it, many teachers are against it.
Homework for Preschool Students
Any homework that focuses on fine motor skills, literacy, or problem solving will benefit your preschoolers a great deal and help them reach their developmental goals. Here is a list of things you can have your preschoolers do for homework. Reading. Cooking. Playing board games. Scavenger hunts. Matching games.
Preschool Curriculum: What Kids Learn in Preschool
A preschool curriculum can also encompass homework given to the child to reinforce what was learned in the classroom, but many educators also believe that homework is unnecessary at such a young age.
Preschool Worksheets & Free Printables
Help your child with his reading skills with this printable worksheet that asks him to identify antonyms. 1st grade. Reading & Writing. Interactive Worksheet. Letter Formation Assessment. Worksheet. Letter Formation Assessment. Assess student writing abilities with this alphabet tracing worksheet. Preschool.
The Importance of Homework
Homework is an important extension of classroom learning. It helps to cement the ideas that children learn at school (or should be learning!), helping things sink in further and expanding their knowledge. Homework can take various forms, consisting of: Solving problems of a mathematical or scientific nature. Answering a series of questions.
Kindergarten Homework: Too Much Too Early?
Kindergarten has taken some getting used to for Walker Sheppard, who didn't attend preschool or day care. Besides all the new rules to remember, there's a new nightly routine: homework. "We ...
Kindergarten Homework: Is It Appropriate?
Kindergarten was a long time ago for many parents! Kindergarten expectations have also changed greatly over the years. By assigning meaningful homework that is relevant to what is going on in class, we can give parents a window into their children's daily lives and learning. Homework can provide students with additional practice and repetition.
Is Homework Good for Kids? Here's What the Research Says
A TIME cover in 1999 read: "Too much homework! How it's hurting our kids, and what parents should do about it.". The accompanying story noted that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to a push ...
Homework for young children: Is it justified?
You might not have heard that homework for young children is a thing. But it is a thing. In a survey of more than 2700 kindergarten teachers - all working in the United States circa 2010 - 40% said they believed that "homework should be given to kindergarten children almost every day" (Bassok et al 2016).
Should Preschoolers Have Homework?
The homework in question is typically worksheets — copying or coloring letters and numbers and name-writing practice, proficiencies that are required for some magnet school entrance "assessments.". And while most parents agreed that the idea of preschool homework was absurd, most also went along with it anyway.
Should Kids Get Homework?
And homework has a greater positive effect on students in secondary school (grades 7-12) than those in elementary. "Every child should be doing homework, but the amount and type that they're doing ...
Preschool Worksheets / FREE Printable Worksheets
Free Printable Preschool Worksheets. Letter Tracing Worksheets. Number Tracing Worksheets. Shape Tracing Worksheets. Picture Tracing Worksheets. Line Tracing Worksheets. Pre Writing Worksheets. Spiral Tracing Worksheet. Cut and Paste Letters.
Key Lessons: What Research Says About the Value of Homework
Too much homework may diminish its effectiveness. While research on the optimum amount of time students should spend on homework is limited, there are indications that for high school students, 1½ to 2½ hours per night is optimum. Middle school students appear to benefit from smaller amounts (less than 1 hour per night).
Free preschool homework
Write the letter 4. Highlight the letter in a sentence 5. Trace and read a word that begins with or contains the letter 6. Identify and color pictures that start with the letter All printables require NO PREP and can be used for independent work, morning work, homework, and literacy centers! PreK - 1 st.
33+ Letter G Activities (Free Version Included)
Perfect for preschool and kindergarten students. Improve literacy, math and fine motor skills with exciting free Letter G activities that are perfect for preschool or kindergarten. ... This is also perfect for a homework packet or to send as activities for the kids during the holiday season. 25.
Residential properties for sale in Omsk Oblast, Russia
For sale is a 1-room apartment, 33.7 sq. m. on the 13th floor of a comfort-class building in…. €98,778. Leave a request. Cheap. Luxury. Find Residential properties for Sale in Omsk Oblast, Russia Large selection of residential properties in latest listings Actual prices Photos Description and Location on the map.
Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast (Russian: О́мская о́бласть, romanized: Omskaya oblast') is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast), located in southwestern Siberia.The oblast has an area of 139,700 square kilometers (53,900 sq mi). Its population is 1,977,665 (2010 Census) [10] with the majority, 1.12 million, living in Omsk, the administrative center.One of the Omsk streets
Omsk State Pedagogical University
Omsk State Pedagogical University was founded by decree No. 298 of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR on March 25, 1932, as Omsk Pedagogical Institute. Initially the institute consisted of three faculties: Philological, Physics and Mathematics, and Biology and Chemistry. The first graduation—79 specialists.
Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk and The Vasyugan Marshes: Heart of Western
Omsk City. Omsk City (kilometer 2716 on the Trans-Siberian Railway) is an industrial city of 1.15 million people. The capital and largest city of Omsk Oblast, it is us where Dostoevsky did four years of hard labor from 1849 to 1854 and was periodically flogged. He wrote about is experienced in Buried Alive in Siberia.

Should Preschoolers Have Homework?

Arguments for Giving Homework to Preschoolers

Arguments Against Giving Homework to Preschoolers

Is There a Compromise?

Sounds & phonics

Simple math

Other activities

Preschool & Kindergarten Worksheets

Numbers and counting

Social & emotional learning

Ready to Make Circle Time Amazing?

Homework in Preschool and Kindergarten

Preschool Homework

Parents and Homework

Reading Aloud to Children as Homework

Meaningful Homework Activities for Parents to Do With Children

Structured Homework

Printable Personalized Practice Cards

How Do I Get Started Setting Up a Homework Program?

More Teaching Tips from Pre-K Pages

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Homework for Preschool Students

WHAT THEY SHOULD BE LEARNING

HOW LONG SHOULD HOMEWORK TIME TAKE

HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU ASSIGN HOMEWORK

Reader Interactions

What Kids Learn in Preschool

What Do Kids Learn in Preschool?

How Preschool Curriculum Is Implemented

Academic Concepts in Preschool Curriculum

Motor Skills in Preschool Curriculum

Social and School-Readiness Skills in Preschool Curriculum

What To Look for in a Preschool Curriculum

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The Importance of Homework

Why Is Homework Important?

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Children With Special Needs

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Kindergarten Homework: Too Much Too Early?

Split Opinions

Eliminating Packets

Risk of ‘Busywork’ vs. Parental Bonding

Finding a Balance

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Kindergarten Homework: Is It Appropriate?

What Appropriate Kindergarten Homework Looks Like

Challenges of Assigning Kindergarten Homework

Conclusions

Related Posts:

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Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

More Must-Reads from TIME

The New York Times

What's Next

Value of Homework

Negative Homework Assignments

Homework that's just busy work.

Homework on material that kids haven't learned yet.

Homework that's overly time-consuming.

Private vs. Public Schools

How to Address Homework Overload

Study Tips for High School Students

Preschool Worksheets

33+ Letter G Activities (Free Version Included)

Letter G Pack

Letter G Vocabulary

Letter G Formation Handwriting and Fine Motor Skills

Letter G Identification Cards

Letter G Games, Puzzles & Patterns

Letter G Reading & Letter Sounds

Letter G Crafts and Art Activities

Letter G Worksheets

Free Letter G Activities Pack

Letter G Activities