India Week

We finally are moving on to our next continent, Asia.  Rather behind where I'd like to be, but oh well, we had fun lingering in Oceania.  We did a gentle introduction to Asia last week with the bulk of the work specific to India this week.

We got our passports stamped for our trip (passport how to post here). Asia Passport Stamps

Older Toad did the Montessori pin flag activity for Asia.  You can get the flags as a free download at Montessori Materials here.  They are not the fold over style so you'll have to tape them to the pins which is not very official Montessori but free is great.

We got a new audiobook for the car, Jungle Book.  The boy's like Kipling, we did Rikki Tikki Tavi and the Just So Stories last year so I knew it'd be popular.  I like to make vocabulary builder projects for our audiobooks so I went to the Discovery Education website to use their free custom word search builder.  It's a great tool.  I like theirs because you can copy the word search you made into another program and bump up the font size.


We did the Tiger lapbook that was a really nice freebie from Homeschool Share.  We did not use it, but there's some free printable curriculum to go with the Magic Treehouse, Tigers at Twilight here.





It was Grandma's birthday last week so we used the Locchricio cookbook to make her an Indian feast.  I love Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks and own several of them.  The Locchricio one is a kids cookbook because the directions are more extensive than regular cookbooks but the quality of the recipes is just as good.  The banana, date chutney was really different and yummy.

 

We looked at the materials from the Indian embassy which I did a post about here.

We took a virtual tour and watched some videos about the Taj Mahal here.

We did the regular stuff like math, handwriting and spelling too.

Originally, I'd hoped to study Diwali when it was actually going on but we got behind.  Instead, reading about it provided some good opportunities to compare it to Christmas.  I asked Toad for some similarities and differences and he came up with some good ones.  He also read one of the Cricket publications about Hinduism. I bought a world religions theme pack on sale awhile back.

We've been getting ready for Christmas around here.  We decorated the tree (which is a bamboo palm this year), made some upcycled gift wrap (post here) and wreaths.  The eggnog has been yummy!

Hope you're enjoying the holiday spirit too!


Update 12/15/12

I should have included that the end of the month is the anniversary of Rudyard Kipling's birthday.  He was born December 30th, 1865.  A resource online.

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