Awesome Geography: Brazil

 For Brazil, the kids had just watched Rio, so they made these cool 3D parrot gliders.



Our active activity was "Cinco Marias," which is a lot like jacks, but played with stones.

My kids really liked this, probably because they never had actual jacks (possibly because I consider them caltrops).

 I guess flying the parrots was an extra active activity!

And for a snack, we made Brazilian brigadeiros, a traditional sweet for kids and parties!

Awesome Geography: Peru

After watching Geography Now, we had our snack.

I had bought some "Incan Corn" from Peru (by way of Trader Joe's) for our snack.  It was really good!  It tasted like tortilla chips but looked like giant puffy corn kernels.  Also, it was super crunchy!

I had big plans for our art and active projects: we were going to spin some wool on a drop spindle and then do a weaving project.

Genius!  Except...

No one wanted to do it (besides me)!

So, I asked them to come up with a project.

They decided to make a rope bridge.

Which even supported our llama, so I count it a success!

Awesome Geography: Chile and Argentina

Besides the Geography now videos, we watched a beautiful documentary on Patagonia

Our active activity was lassoing like the gauchos in the documentary.  My favorite comment was from Choclo who announced he would teach us, "how to lasso a kid"  He tried for his sister, but ended up flipping it back on himself.

Technically, he did lasso a kid!

A few tries later he also got his sister.

For our snack, we ate beef kabobs.

Because of the extra video time, we didn't do an art project per se, unless you  count learning to tie a lasso knot!

Awesome Geography: Antarctica

This was a fun one!

I wanted to do an art project based on icebergs, but I wasn't sure how to do it. 

Finally, I hit in the idea of having the kids crumple and tear paper to make their iceberg, and then photocopy the crumpled paper. 

 The crumples gave a great ice like texture, and the photocopying provided realistic shading, including a shadow behind each berg.

Then the kids drew tiny penguins with pens.  Really, you just need the idea of penguins, so these are mostly little lines.


Lastly, they used pastels and/or crayons to indicate water, sky, and even an aurora!

One cool trick is to make a gradient from lighter to darker blue to indicate water depth. 


And, of course, most of the iceberg is under water!

For our snack we made snow cones by grinding ice in the blender and pouring a simple sugar syrup over it.


As you can see, Mike really liked this class!

Awesome Geography: Indonesia, Plus Australia and New Zealand

I am way falling behind on my geography posting, so this post will cover two weeks of classes.

My interest in geography actually stems from the fact that my dad traveled the world constantly when I was little.

Actually, he only stopped traveling after Mxyl was born, but when I was little, he brought me things from each of the countries he went to.  Often it was dolls, and I still have my collection, somewhat worse for the fact that I loved playing with all the dolls.

Well, most of the dolls.  The dolls from Indonesia were these terrifying puppets. 

But, hey, that means they survived intact and my kids get to have nightmares about them too!


For both active and art activities, the kids created a puppet show.  Most of the puppets were made of paper on popsicle sticks.  For our "snack" we had sate chicken for lunch.

For Australia and New Zealand, we did Maori designs on wood, inspired
by this fence.

This was just sharpies on the big tongue depressor style popsicle sticks.  We may be detecting a theme.

And our active activity was throwing boomerangs.

We actually happen to have real boomerangs, thanks to having friends and family (Bill and Grammy and Pop) travel to Australia when the World Science Fiction convention was held there.


A word of advice if you try this: look up online how to actually throw one, it doesn't work the way you think.  Also, have a large empty space.  Also, plan to throw it at least ten times before you get it to curve back to you.

Awesome Geography: Japan

We do a lot of things involving Japan, not least because Mxyl speaks Japanese, has been to Japan, and does "fan subbing" for Japanese TV shows.

We decided to do origami as our art project and a Sakura Box (box of random treats from Japan) as our snack.

All I can say is that this was both hilarious and amazing!

Not only were some snacks difficult to translate, there were some snacks (Texas Corn!) that were delicious but completely strange (not really corny and nothing to do with Texas - kinda like cheese balls without cheese).
But super fun!  Of course we did Geography Now's Japan episode, and we also watched some Japanese shorts on The Kid Should See This.

Awesome Geography: Nepal

Following along Geography Now Nepal



Our art activity was this torn paper mountain scene. 

We tore light and dark gray construction paper for the mountains and light and dark green for the hills.

We accented the "mountains" with white chalk pastels to suggest snow, then did a little more on the blue paper to make clouds. 

If it isn't obvious, you generally put the lighter color behind the darker color to give atmospheric perspective.

 I loved the way it came out!

For our snack we made Himalayan flatbreads  (pretty much chapatis) which we ate with Momo sauce.

Our active activity was supposed to be Dandi Biyo, or at least a variant, but we ran out of time.  I guess the active part was rolling out chapatis!  

Also, we all loved the Momo sauce!  Choclo said it was spicy like Indian food and spicy like Mexican food at the same time (guess who likes spicy food?).  But it wasn't overwhelmingly spicy to me, and I have a much lower spice tolerence.

Awesome Geography: China

 China is one of those study topics that's hard because you're spoiled for choice.  We chose to watch Geography Now's China episode!


For our art project, we made slat books from popsicle sticks and markers.  Evidently, the first books in China were made like this (but using bamboo and twine), hence the propensity for writing vertically.




We've all eaten Chinese food recently, so we had tea and Chinese candy.  I had the foresight to order snacks from a number of the countries we are studying this semester.



And our active activity was Mahjong.  We don't have a tile set, so we played it online.

Might be a stretch to call it active, but it was fun!

Awesome Geography: Mongolia

We're finishing up Awesome Geography on our own this semester because our little three family Friday morning co-op got excited about a new project.  More on that later.

I am also excited about that project, but, having failed to finish the first Big Trip, I am determined to finish this one!

So we ended up back in Mongolia!

We watched the Geography Now Mongolia episode, as well as this fantastic music video from The Hu.


We drew horses for art, ate Mongolian beef, and watched The Story of the Weeping Camel.

Awesome Geography: Russia

 For our last class for the semester we did Russia and a May Crowning and a party!

For our art activity, we did this lovely icon craft from Orthodox Pebbles.

All you need is cardboard, foil, and their printout (at the link above).  The kids "engraved" the foil with dull pencils, then added some "gems."

 Not only did they really enjoy it, but the icons themselves were really lovely!

And it tied into our May Crowning!


We even had a First Communicant to do the crowning!


And, for the snack, my friends surprised me with birthday cake!

Awesome Geography: Turkey

 We had a good time with Turkey.  We did a lot with Istanbul (Constantinople), the Hagia Sophia, and some great travel videos before class.

Our art activity was making marbled paper using shaving cream as a base with liquid watercolor (food coloring works also) swirled into it.





You press the paper onto the cream, then scrape off the foam with a popsicle stick.

The results wee strikingly beautiful!

For our snack we had actual Turkish Delight from Turkey!

I have to say, having tried some from England a while back, it is seriously worth it if you can find the real thing!

One of the gifts of this class is having younger kids for my younger kids to play with.

I mean, Choclo is 13, so my younger kids aren't too young, but they missed out on having little ones around all the time.

It's delightful to see them enjoy little ones the way the older Zoomlians enjoyed them!




UPDATE: I forgot the most surprising thing I discovered about Turkey!  I can't remember who asked the question: Which came first, the name for the bird or the country?

Turks (people from Turkey) visited India, and found them cultivating a food bird we call the Guinea Hen (as in Guinea from Africa, where it originated).  The Turks imported them, calling them India birds, which got shortened to indians.  Seriously, Turks ate indians.

The British visited Turkey and found these birds as marvelous as the Turks did, so they imported them to  Britain, calling them... turkeys.

British immigrated to America where they found a similar looking (and equally tasty) bird in the wild, so they called it a wild turkey.  And since they were calling the native people Indians, Indians were eating turkeys before the Turks were eating indians.

It makes me wonder if residents of Hamburg find it unsettling that Americans eat hamburgers.

Awesome Geography: Saudi Arabia

 Our art activity was a desert camel scene,  The background is torn paper, and the camel was formed around a handprint.

I love doing handprint crafts because I love seeing how small my kids' hands used to be!

This time around, no one wanted to use a paint based handprint (no one wanted the goopy paint on their fingers), so they traced their hands on brown paper and cut it out, adding the heads and tails.

Leena just cut out a tiny camel of her own devising. Her hand hasn't been that small in a loooong time!

Honestly, I think the camels came out a bit...weird.  I think next time I'd have them draw them.



Snack was dates.  Just dates.  And then it turned out some of the kids didn't like dates because they were too sweet.

I have to admit, near the very bottom of Lent, my kids and I were like: YES!  SWEEEEEEET!!! LOVE THE DATES!

Which may mean that (outside of Lent) we are not a low sugar household.

The active activity was supposed to be The Hunter, but it rained... Are we detecting a theme?

Honestly, we all still had fun, but it wasn't our most successful class.  I also had a hard time finding good resources to learn about Saudi Arabia.  I ended up using a bunch of videos from Geography Go.

Awesome Geography: Madagascar

Madagascar is such a strange and unique place, it was super fun to learn about!

Our art project centered on baobab trees.  I had cut a bunch of  differently sized baobab silhouettes out of black paper.  Having done this, cutting 4 at a time out of folded paper, they could actually all be the same size and you could just put them at different heights.



Anyway, the kids arranged them on contact paper, then arranged tissue paper to make a sunrise or sunset.



I love how they came out!

Oob wanted to do a night scene with some extra trees.  he put down the trees then spattered it with silver paint (glitter would also work well), then put on darker blues.

This is one of those crafts that looks great regardless of age.

Our snack was vanilla wafers (vanilla originally came from Madagascar).

We were going to play Mancala as the active activity, but we forgot to bring along the boards!