Social Studies

In my last post, I showed pictures of the kids and the passports we made. I cut some heavy paper into rectangles and also cut some white construction paper into smaller rectangles. Folded it all in half, punched holes, and threaded yarn through. Voila, passports. Colwyn decorated his with smiley stickers while Lachlann just hugged his almost do death. The idea is that as we learn about other countries/cultures, we'll put little "stamps" (probably just pictures we draw) to represent our imagined trip there. Our first country is Ethiopia.

We've been listening to the Putamayo African Playground CD which has an Ethiopian song on it (as well as songs from other African countries). We've looked up Ethiopia on our globe and we drew an outline drawing of it. I printed out a few maps from Enchanted Learning and we've looked at those, too. We checked out a book on Ethiopia from the library, and got Ethiopian takeout this weekend. Colwyn tried injera and dabo, but wasn't too keen on any of the wots. This morning, both boys helped me paint an egg carton that we'll use as a mancala gameboard. Sometime this week we'll also play a type of hide-and-seek game called Kukulu. When that's done, we'll make a little stamp to represent Ethiopia.

I'm not positive that he'll retain any of this longterm or anything, but I'm hoping the exposure to other cultures will at least influence his longterm ability to be open and tolerant. We'll probably go easy on the next one and do Wales.. since we're of Welsh descent, it should be pretty easy. We'll listen to Hugin the Bard to start, as well as some of our other Welsh music, do some dragon crafts, and who knows what else.

One of the other things I'm trying to get set up is a penpal family (or several, ideally). The idea is to exchange small packages with other families to get an idea of what their lives are like. It'll be fun to connect with other homeschooling families, and we'll be able to mark on a map where we send/get packages to/from. Actually, I have no idea who reads this blog, but if anyone out there is interested, leave a comment and we can work something out.