Happy Chinese New Year!
We hit the photobooth last night, dressed in our Chinese new year garb...
all of us, with my fake moustache...
From the Sweet Spud's kit, our Karaoke Chinatown.
and from the Dozen's, 3 reasons to BEE Happy
Don't forget to check out the new Category Stories challenge on the first, you'll love it! Come play along!
We plowed through a lot of schoolwork this week. The cold and gloomy weather lends itself nicely to getting a lot accomplished. Always an inspiration is The Little Traveler's who I check in with a couple times a month. She always doing great cultural studies and we won one of her DVD, Japan. Her kids have gotten to experience so much of the world through immersion and I'm always jealous of their trips. At home they are always doing fun and creative things, too. I loved her idea of 52 meals; essentially one meal a week for 52 weeks, covering all parts of the globe. Her kids color in the country or area on a map they are making that traditional meal from. We do something similar, our Passport Dinners, but we only do those every 2-3 months. For a week we study a country or region, watch documentaries or movies about it, read children's books with that theme, do crafts, and then we end with a big dinner, with traditional foods and we try to dress up like the traditional dress if possible. I like the idea of 52 dinners though, that seems like a great way to study geography as well as learning cooking skills. I'm a big believer in allowing kids to help out in the kitchen! Even if they make a mess, it's teaching science and math as well as life skills.
our lemon-blueberry cupcakes were divine!
straight out of the oven!
Some last pictures of us the last couple weeks in the homeschooling world...
a geography book we love, Search and Find Around the World, has great cartoon illustrations with fun facts about the areas.
Cricket's 3D art
clay heads on wood board, Cricket calls it "3D Flat"
(Note* after writing this post, I found out Angelina from Little Travelers and I are old friends. We did a Doula training together like 10 years ago in Phoenix. What a crazy, small world!)
