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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Flags of Australia/Oceania

We've finally moved on to our study of Oceania/Australia.  We put stickers for the Cook Islands and French Polynesia in our passports and date stamped them.  Here is my post about the passports I made for the Toads.  Below are the stamps if you'd like a copy.


Oceania Passport Stamps

Older toad decided to start with the flag pinning activity.  He went to a Montessori preschool but didn't have access to this activity.  The school kept it in the 3-6 room.  The state of Florida sponsors a pre-Kindergarten program which he was participating in.  The VPK program, as it's called, focuses on early literacy and math skills so that was the focus of the program but with Montessori techniques and materials.  Oceania has many small island nations he'd never heard of so he found this activity hard.


Flags have a fair bit of diversity to their shapes and patterns.  I made these two handouts for a western culture class I taught a couple of years ago.  I included them in his pack of flags because Toad had asked why some flags are different shapes and where their patterns come from.  If you'd like to learn more about flags, Flags of the World is an awesome website.


Flag Shapes Flag Patterns

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Passports

If you're going to be an international traveler, you're going to need a passport.  We "leave" on Monday for our international year and neither of the boys have passports so I made some up for our trips.

I bought blank ones from Rainbow Resources for under a dollar so that was worth the time to not assemble it.

Satori Smiles blog has this post on how they made their passports.  They used a PDF that was a Five in a Row PDF.  I used their photo page, added the specific info, printed it on full sheet printer labels, cut it out and stuck it in.

I scanned the first and last page spreads of my current passport, printed those out and put them in theirs too.

For the interior, I printed out small labels that said 'Visas' and put them at the top of every interior page.  My first passport had that with the arrival and departure section but I left that out for this.

So now for every country we visit they can get a passport stamp.  The above mentioned PDF has some blank ones you can use.  Also, Oriental Trading Company had some nice looking passport stickers as well as passport kits but I didn't need that many.

I was planning on using the blank labels again and printing them out.  Flickr has a whole section started by someone associated with Lonely Planet of passport stamps organized by country. The diversity of stamps is I think part of the fun.   I can use those and change the dates.  I bought a cheap office date stamp or I can do it on the computer.

So now we just have to pack our luggage...