Awesome Geography: Mexico

We are taking a trip around the world with our Awesome Geography class!  Yes, we have done this a bit before, but I think I'll have an easier time with follow through as a class with other families.

The format is that we do a country a week, doing whatever study and activities each family wants to do, then we meet up Friday morning and do an art activity, an active activity, and food from that country.


Yes, it does sound a bit like Awesome History...

At any rate, we have the big advantage of having people with actual ties to some of the countries we are studying!

My friend, Shelli, is half Mexican, half German, and married a Swiss guard when she was living in Italy.  She's half of our first semester!

Anyway, we started in Mexico, making a pinata as our art activity.  The kids loved this, not least when she filled it with tamarind chili candy and let them have at it!

Breaking the pinata could have counted as our active activity, but she also had brought some beautiful wooden toys from Mexico, and the kids had fun with them, too.  We had been planning to also do marbles (a game she played a lot while visiting her grandmother in Mexico City every summer), but the kids hadn't seen each other in a
while and they just started playing...




For our snack, we had cut up fruit with pico fruta.  It's chili pepper with salt, sugar, and...lime?  I think the stuff I had used citric acid, but traditionally it would be lime juice, I think.

We let people put on as much or little as they wanted, and, for me, it was addictive!

Sooooo good: sweet/sour/salty/spicy all at once!

Evidently it's often sold as street food in Mexico city, usually with mangoes.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to Geography Now!  We used their Mexico video and their Geography GO! Mexico! video, and we loved them.  We've been watching a lot of his videos and I loved Choclo's comment, "All those countries have real people in them doing real stuff!"  Yes, my boy, they do!