Hello!

Yes, I realize it has been more than 52 weeks since we started this project, but we (being Deirdre, Jonah, and myself) have magnanimously granted ourselves an extension.

Our latest virtual trip has been to the nation of Japan, home of everyone’s favorite anime character – Hello Kitty.  We began our adventure by reading a great book from our library which described in  detail the various types of clothing, customs and housing in Japan over the past several hundred years.  The kids were particularly fascinated with how typical dress varied depending upon one’s occupation or station in life.  Really, who wouldn’t be fascinated by a gorgeous silk kimono and obi?

Vegetable Sushi - Yum!!!

For the culinary part of the adventure, we made homemade sushi, teriyaki salmon & veggies, miso soup and rice.  I found a really neat little sushi kit by Annie Chun which made it so easy to roll the sushi.   Honestly, I thought the kids would be a little bit more excited about making sushi rolls, but apparently, I was wrong.   However, they did down their bowls of miso in a matter of minutes.

Maneki Neko Cat - Spread The Luck

One of the highlights of this lesson was learning about the Maneki Neko welcoming cat.  This kitty has his paw raised to let people know that they are welcome into your home or shop.  You can read the legend of Maneki Neko at ActionCat. The good people at Action Cat suggested adding a link to an animal rescue group to continue the gift of the welcoming cat.  I suggest you check out Best Friends Animal Society.  You can also color your own Maneki  the Coloring Castle.

Finally, for our craft, we were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and decorative fans.  We decided to use stamps and water color paints to decorate plain paper with vines, flowers, and even a few dinosaur pictures!  We intended to fold the paper into fans and tie the bottom with a ribbon.  But, since they didn’t come out as we expected, we ended up cutting our decorated paper into strips and making these cool book marks!

Next trip, we will venture to Kenya!

Colorful Powders to Celebrate Holi

India is such an enormous, diverse county, it was hard to decide where to start. Since it was lunchtime, we headed straight for the cookbook and whipped up a batch of banana (kela) lassi. Of course, mango lassi would have been more traditional, but we had to work with what we had in the kitchen.  You can check out our yummy recipe at the end of this post.  We decided to focus on food (of course), folklore, and festivals.  We checked out two books from the library which I would recommend.  The first, The Indian Storybook by Rani Singh tells 8 different Indian tales and gives a quick overview of some of the Hindu gods encountered in the stories.  The second, Festive Foods! India by Sylvia Goulding mixes simple (as if any Indian recipe could be simple!) recipes with culture and heritage.

Since we spent the weekend in NYC, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to eat authentic Indian food on 5th Street in Manhattan.  Basically, the entire block between 1st and 2nd Avenues is is entirely populated by Indian restaurants.  If you are lucky (as we were), you can listen to live sitar music as you eat.  We stopped in at Raj Mahal, one of our long time favorites, although I don’t think you can go wrong with any of your options.  If you haven’t taken your kids out for Indian food yet, don’t be intimidated by the spicy dishes.  There are plenty of mild options that our kids love.  You can try chicken kurma (chicken in a slightly sweet, almond sauce), mulligatawny soup (turmeric spiced soup), and an order of vegetable pakoras (fritters).

We really wanted to celebrate Holi, the festival of colors, but the weather hasn’t cooperated.  During Holi, celebrants throw colored powder and colored water on each other to celebrate unity and the beginning of spring.  We thought this sounded like a really fun idea, but definitely an outside activity.  Even though Holi was officially celebrated last month, we might have our own celebration later in the spring.  We plan to make our ‘colored’ water with kool-aid, and use flour colored with dry kool-aid or jello mix for our colored powders.  I’ll update this post to let you you know how it turns out!

Banana or Mango Lassi

Ingredients:

• 1 ripe banana or 1 mango
• 2 cups of full fat plain yogurt
• 2-4 ice cubes
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• optional – pinch of cardamom
• optional – fresh mint

Put all ingredients in a blender and blend well.  Garnish with a sprig of mint and a bit of crushed ice.  Enjoy!

Next stop, Japan!

Since we seemed to get REALLY behind schedule with our ’round the world project we decided to cover Guatemala and Honduras together, mainly because they are close both geographically and alphabetically.  We were able to check out a couple of really good books from the library with a lot of wonderful pictures.  Deirdre was particularly enchanted with the colorful outfits worn by many of the Guatemalan girls in the book.  We spent most of our time talking about the wildlife indiginous to these countries.  The kids were especially interested in looking at pictures of jaguars, toucans, blue morpho butterflies, and sea turtles.  The kids also decided that Diego might live in this area since these seem like the animals that he hangs out with!  This gave us a good opportunity to talk a little bit about wildlife conservation and sustainable farming practices which wasn’t exactly what I intended but was covered in the book.  Not a bad lesson to learn!

For our project, we made worry dolls.

Our Worry Doll Family

Legend has it that Guatemalan children would make these worry dolls out of scraps of thread and fabric.  At night, they would tell a ‘worry’ to each doll, and the doll would help make that worry disappear.  Here are some basic intructions to make your own!

Materials Needed:

1. Twist ties
2. Yarn
3. Fabric Scraps
4. Marking Pen

Instructions:

1. Bend twist-ties into basic T-shape for your doll’s body
2. Fold a piece of fabric over the top of the “T” for the head
3. Wrap yarn around the neck to secure head; wrap yarn around body, arms, and legs.
4. Tie on a dress or serape
5. Use marking pen to draw on a face

Step 1 - Bend Twist Ties

Step 2 - Add Fabric Head and Cover with Yarn

Step 3 - Add Clothing

Step 4 - Add Faces!

For our snack, we tried making dulce de leche cookies.

Dulce de Leche Cookies -yum!

Although not specifically Guatemalan or Honduran, they are still somewhat regional.  (we substituted corn flour for the corn starch). What did I learn?  Dulce de leche is REALLY hard to make.  Seriously, you need to stir it for, like, 3 hours.  The cookies came out tasty, but we probably won’t be making them again.

Next stop, by popular demand, India!

Lavender Field in Provence

Wow, have I been remiss in writing my post on France!  Between the various Halloween parties and some on-going home renovations, we really didn’t get a chance to do this lovely country justice.  As a starting point, we checked out a book from the library on life in France.  The book was told from the point of view of a 7-year old boy, so it really held the kids’ attention.  Their biggest takeaway was that life in France is not all that different than life here in the US.   Children go to school, ride their bikes, play sports, and live in houses with their families.   For many of the other countries, we focused on unique differences; in this case, we focused on similarities.

Ballerina in Pink - Degas

For me, you can’t study France without talking about art and food.  I decided that we didn’t have time, and the kids didn’t have the patience for a deep dive into impressionism, but we did spend some time reading about Degas.  I thought his ballerina paintings would appeal to Deirdre.  For cuisine, I tried my hand at making beouf bourguignon, and our Czech Republic pancakes seemed to have resurrected themselves in the form of crepes!

The highlight, of course, was spending an evening with our friends Laurent, Julia, Lucy and baby Emile.  Laurent is from France and the whole family is fluent in French.  This gave Deirdre and Jonah a chance to practice their “Bonjour” and “Je m’appelle…” among other phrases.  Although Deirdre still didn’t get an answer to her burning question of how did they get Marie Antionette to hold still when they cut off her head.  (too much Alice in Wonderland this fall)  Finally, a special thanks to Laurent for his delicious fall stew and for firing the pottery we made from our Bangladesh study!

Someday, I will actually visit the lavender fields in Provence.  In the meantime, next stop — Guatemala.

We really had fun with “Egyptian Week”.  Needless to say, everyone wanted to study ancient Egypt rather than modern Egypt.  Although, we talked about pyramids, the sphinx, mummies and Egyptian gods, we also learned about ancient Egyptian homes, cuisine, and clothing.   Here are a few interesting facts that we learned this week:

• Ancient Egyptians used honey  to help wounds heal and help prevent infections
• Beer and bread were staples in the Ancient Egyptian diet
• In the Old Kingdom Egyptians were even paid in food
• Some authorities credit ancient Egypt as being the birth place of modern medicine

I checked a book out of the library called Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors, an Activity Guide by Marian Broida which had crafts and activities associated with almost every aspect of ancient life.  I definitely recommend it.  The book covered everything from daily living and food to religion and the afterlife.  Based on the book’s instructions, we made a model Egyptian courtyard (just the right size for Polly Pocket), made a mummy out of Pink Bear, made our own Egyptian costumes, wrote in hieroglyphics and baked fig bread.

Model of an Ancient Egyptian Courtyard Garden

Pink Bear as a Mummy

Ancient Egyptian Dress

We also did a night of Egyptian cuisine.  The pictures don’t do the food justice — it was actually really tasty!  Our menu consisted of Egyptian Beef and Okra Stew over rice (yes, another excuse to use the okra in my garden), hummus, pomegranate, and fig bread.

Egyptian Cuisine - Beef & Okra Stew over Rice, Fig Bread, Hummus, Pomegranate

Finally, we found watched a series of video shorts on the Discovery Channel about ancient Egypt.  Next, we are off to France!

Since we’re still working on “Around the World in 52 Weeks”, I thought this They Might Be Giants video would be a perfect theme song.  Although we’re not doing the exact same list, we’re certainly covering a lot of them.  I just hope we can make it through to Zimbabwe… (On a side note, this was the encore at their Sept. 26 show at Town Hall in NYC – awesome!)

We didn’t find any books on Dominica in the children’s section of the library, so we did all of our research on the “Nature Island” online.

Dominica - The Nature Island

I have to admit, looking at pictures of this gorgeous Caribbean island made me want to schedule a vacation RIGHT NOW!  The things that most impressed the kids about Dominica is that fact that it has 16 active volcanoes, a boiling lake, and is surrounded by beautiful marine-life. And, as Jon pointed out, there is amazing kayaking to be found.

In the spirit of Dominica, we decided to create our own volcanic island in our backyard.  As luck would have it, I left the top off the sandbox right before a rainstorm, so we had a large box of sand and water right at our finger tips.  We made a mountain out of the sand, surrounded by our ‘ocean’.   The core of our  volcano was a bottle (Pilsner Urquell left of from Czech week!), and we used paprika to make our lava appear red.  Then, we just added some baking soda, poured in some vinegar, and voila!  A volcanic island!  Yes, I did spend the next 45 minutes bailing out the sandbox so that we did not end up with 0ur own ecological disaster.

Building our volcano

Pouring the vinegar

Kaboom! Lava flow!

After looking at pictures of tropical fish, turtles and other sea life, we decided to do an ocean-themed craft.  We actually combined the concept of traditional basket weaving and marine life to make these cute woven-paper fish.  They were fun to make, and Deirdre was able to do most of the cutting on her own, although she needed some help with the weaving.  Jonah decorated his fish like a ‘robot fish’.  I’ve included some instructions to make your own.

A School of Fish

Cut 2 Rectangles

Cut into strips, leaving about 1/2 uncut at the edge

Use basket weave technique to weave together your 2 pieces

Alternate weave until all pieces are woven together

Fold edges over and glue down

Cut fins along lines as shown

Give your fishy a happy face!

Next stop — Egypt!

What’s not to love about a country with the highest per capita consumption of beer in the world  AND boasts a 99% literacy rate?   As they say in Czech “Kde se pivo vari, tam se dobre dari” (Where beer is brewed, they have it good!).  I was looking forward to exploring the Czech Republic for a couple of reasons — 1) my cousin Jennifer and I visited Prague about 8 years ago, and I absolutely loved it, and 2) my husband is of Czech decent on his mother’s side of the family, so this falls under the “family heritage clause” of this project.

We started off by reading through a pretty decent library book on Czech history and culture, and, of course, the kids were fascinated by the fact that the Czech Republic is teeming with castles.  They have added this to their list of places that they definitely want to visit.  We also found a website with Czech fairy tales so we read through a few of those.  I had forgotten that fairy tales do tend a little bit toward the macabre.  We also found a site with audio of common Czech phrases , and we had fun wishing each other “dobry den” in the morning.

Since the Czech Republic is known for their crystal beads (I really wish I had bought more of these beads when I visited Prague), we pretended to be jewelry makers and used Deirdre’s pop-beads for our necklaces.  I also remembered the amazing marionette shops and was hoping we could put on a puppet show, but, unfortunately, we didn’t seem to make the time for it.  The kids really enjoyed watching videos of Czech folk dancing, and they loved dancing around the kitchen to the music.  Deirdre REALLY wanted to me to make her an authentic folk dancing costume, but that was just way beyond my realm of capabilities right now.  Maybe sometime…

Finally, we dabbled in Czech cooking.  We found this recipe for Palacinky (Czech pancakes) in one of our books, and the kids loved them so much, we ended up making them every morning for a week and a half.  There is now a “No Czech Pancake” rule in my house.

Czech Pancakes for Breakfast

Palacinky (Czech Pancakes) – 4 servings

Ingredients
1 cup flour
1 cup milk
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp suger
2 tbsp melted butter
1/4 tsp salt

Directions
Mix eggs with milk. Add salt, butter, sugar, vanilla, and flour, mix until smoother. Heat and lightly grease griddle or frying pan. Make thin, crepe-like pancakes by filling a pan about half full in center and tilting pan so batter spreads quickly over bottom to edges.  Heat until batter is dry, then tun over and cook the other side.  Spread jam on pancake and roll up.  Sprinkle powered sugar on top.

We also had Czech food one night and made Chicken Paprika and Cabbage Poached in Vingear.  Pretty tasty, and the cabbage recipe gave me the chance to finally open the caraway seeds that came with my spice set!  And, of course, we had a Pilsner Urqell!

Next week – Dominica

I learned a few things myself this week during our ‘journey’ to Bangladesh.  I had always thought of it as a ‘tiny’ country over by India.  I really had no idea that it is one of the most populous nations in the world (7th largest population).

Fresh Okra

The book that we selected from the library was a little bit too dense for the kids, but we had fun scanning through the pictures and talking about what life might be like in a small village or large city in Bangladesh.  There was one chapter that talked about children growing up in poverty, and it mentioned that although kids didn’t have many playthings, they enjoyed playing games like hide-and-seek.  For some reason this really resonated with my kids — a common bond over one of their favorite games!  And, of course the wanted to talk about Bengal tigers (as luck would have it, we saw one at the zoo while we were on vacation a few weeks ago).

We also found a website that translated the letters of your name, or any word for that matter, into Devanagari, one of the forms of script used in Bangladesh. We printed out the kids’ names in really large font, and they decorated them to look like calligraphy painintngs.

Our two biggest projects were pottery and cooking Bengali food.  We learned that throwing pottery is a traditional trade in a number of villages.  I don’t have a pottery wheel, but we did manage to have fun doing some hand-building.   And, I’m pretty sure the villagers in Bangladesh focus more on  throwing bowl and pots, rather than animal-shaped Christmas tree ornaments.  Hopefully, we will be able to have these fired soon (thanks, Laurent!)

Our Own Pottery Workshop

Finally, I decided to try my hand at a homemade Chapati (flat bread),  Dhedosh (Okra) and Masoor Daal (lentils) The chapati was surprisingly easy and satisfying to make.  It was definitely a recipe that lent itself to having a 5-year old sous-chef.  Deirdre loved making balls with the dough and rolling them out flat.  And, I was thrilled to make the okra since we actually grew it in our garden this summer.  Yes, the picture at the top of this post is okra straight from the garden!  whoo hooo!  I had to leave out a couple of the more exotic spices since I didn’t have them in stock, but the meal was actually very tasty.  I’ll definitely cook my okra this way for the rest of the season.

Attempting the Cuisine - Lentils, Okra and Chapati

Next week, Czech Republic…

Welcome to Australia!  When the kids chose Australia as our first place to visit, I was a little unsure of where to start, since I hadn’t really thought through the “lesson plan” of the project.

Aborigine-inspired Dot Painting

I decided the easiest thing to do would be give the kids a basic overview of the country and see what interested them most.  We could take it from there.   Since I decided that we would not be using the internet as our sole source of info, we hopped in the car and headed over to the library.  This, in itself, was actually a great educational experience since it was the first time we actually had to use the dewey decimal system to find specific books. (usually, we just browse the shelves for kid’s stories).  We found a great book on Australia which highlighted all the basics like geography, resources, industry, population, etc.  As it turned out, they were most interested in aborigine lifestyle, local animals, and food.  I guess imports/exports, industry and geography just don’t cut it with the preschool set these days.

Honestly, they were fascinated by anything to do with the aborigines’ culture.  We checked out kids’ crafts for an Aboriginal Mask and Aboriginal Snake Painting, but in the end, we decided to do an art project inspired by the aboriginal dot paintings.  This ended up being one of the coolest projects we’ve done, and I’ve outlined the instructions below.  We talked about how the paintings represented something in nature or told a story in lieu of written books.  I like Deirdre painting the best — she said it is a mother snake with eggs and newly hatched baby snakes.  Jonah make Tuck the Turtle from the Wonderpets (basically, everything he does these days involved Tuck or Diego).

Then we listened to some didgeridoo music, and they managed to find some pretty funky Didgeridoo Trance/Beatbox which, although not traditional, was totally fun.  We tried making cardboard tube didgeridoos, but then Jon made some out of PVC pipe which sounded a hell of a lot better!

As for the wildlife, we read a book on marsupials, another book on snakes, and watched some you-tube video of sharks.  As luck would have it, I found a movie on-demand about a boy who rescued a joey, which fit in perfectly with our theme.

Yummy Meat Pie!

On Thursday we decided to cook an Australian inspired meal. (no, we did NOT go to Outback Steakhouse).  Jon found a website with recipes from around the world, and we decided to make Australian meat pie and apple/carrot salad.  We topped of the meal with cookies shaped like kangaroos (once again, not traditional, but the kids thought up the idea by themselves).

All and all, a good start!  Next…Bangladesh.

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Directions for Dot Paintings

Materials

1. Cardboard or wood
2. Acrylic paint
3. Q-tips (at least one for each color)

The Artists Hard At Work

Process

• decide what you would like to paint, such as a scene from nature, abstract design, or story image
• dip Q-tip in a darker color and outline the image you would like to paint.  Use a straight up and down motion to get a round dot
• dip Q-tip in a different color and fill in your object with dots
• use your dots to create different designs in the background
• when the paint has dried, you can go back with a different color and add features (eyes, mouth) to your images or more details to your abstract designs