Taking a trip to Nigeria...

Alas, only a virtual trip but it was fun all the same. From the swaps we have done in the past we have collected a number of items from Africa, not all of them are from Nigeria but we got them out of the continent box anyway.

The reason we did Nigeria is that we have the most items from there, a while ago I did a swap and got a great package which included a handmade book about a child living in Nigeria and the story of her going to a family wedding, a really nice touch. The snack which was included in the pack made my Japanese speaking friends laugh because it was called chin-chin, which in Japanese is a word for 'boys bits'. Ebi-kun obviously though this was hysterical. It did lead onto a discussion of how words can have different meanings in different languages.

The swap pack also included this book, Bisi and the Golden Disc which was an interesting read and we also looked through Africa Is Not A Country to find the page about Nigeria. It is a great book and I highly recommend it for your Africa box.

We also got out my Mancala game. This set was given to me by a good friend who did a couple of years voluntary work in Nigeria, it is hand carved and used dried beans for the stones. We do have a commercial set too that is small and fits in the game drawer. It would be easy to make a set using an egg carton and marbles, the rules to play are here.

The other thing he did was the map of Africa, I bought these maps years ago so I'm not sure how correct they are now, I am sure a country or two has disappeared and a new one emerged! Whilst he was doing it he was asking me for a random fact about each country, hurrah for google is all I can say about that.

Want to know more about Montessori?
Or are you struggling to make it work at home?
Sign up for the free Montessori Demystified workshop below...

You will also be added to my weekly newsletter and no, I will never spam you!

 

All About Japan - pack

When I joined the last culture swap I made a PDF file to go with it, of course, I got a bit carried away and what started out as a couple of pages ended up at 26 pages of information!

It includes pages about geography, food, traditions, housing, festivals, recipes, language, a quiz and fun facts plus a pile of 3 part cards that you can print out and laminate. The text is written as if Ebi-kun wrote it himself, so it sounds like it is coming from a 6 year old.

If you would like a copy, I have added it to the culture store, just pop over here!

Culture Swap partners wanted....

I have joined the culture swap that Melissa at Chasing Cheerios organised and I have two sets of goodies left over. Our Africa and Asia boxes are quite lacking in items so if you are in Africa or have ties to somewhere in Africa and can put together a few items and the same goes for Asia, specifially Mongolia, any of the 'stans' except Pakistan, Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, Laos, Myanmar or any of the Arabian countries then please get in touch.

The package I have put together contains several small items from Japan and I also made a PDF written in the voice of Ebi-kun and with loads of printables for you to use.

I plan to give Ebi-kun a package at the start of each month and we will concentrate of that continent for the month. I want to make him a passport to go with it but I haven't got round to that yet.

Books from down under

We have been working our way through the books that we have for Australasia, I have to thank Liv for many of these, thanks Liv!

We have quite a few of these little books, they are great and the photography in them is amazing, they are by Steve Parish and I have just been looking at his website, looks like a great place to go for Aussie resources.

Edward the Emu is probably Ebi-kuns favourite from  the lot, it is about an emu who thinks that it would be more fun to be a different animal so he goes to the lion pen and the snake pen and pretends to be each of the animals, very cute book and well illustrated.

To cover wombats, there are the super cute books Baby Wombat's week and The Diary of a Wombat, again the illustrations are delightful, almost makes me want a wombat for a pet!

We also have Waddle Giggle Gaggle and Mr McGee and The Biting Flea and Fancy That! all by Pamela Allen which are fun books to read. We also have a couple of books that I think are out of print, Tasmania - a wildlife journey by Joyce Powzyk which is aimed at a slightly older child, the text is a bit 'dry' but worth a look at if you find it in the library and Dolphins by Margaret Davidson. The rest of the books we reference books such as the Children Like Me book, Flags Of The World and various encyclopedia's. anything else that we needed I used my good old friend google! Seriously, how did the word cope before google?

The problem with Ebi-kun being at yochien is that we can't fit as much in as I would like but I hope that they things that we do at home will give him a great appreciation of the world around us and a curiosity that will inspiring his learning. If you are looking for more Australasian things to do, Se7en has a great round up of what they studied here I also checked the posts that I had featured on the Goldmine so try here, here, here, here and here

and then we built....

Sydney Opera House

I printed it from papertoys, they have lots of great printables, I will be going back for more, the main page is here. Ebi-kun cut out the base and I cut out the parts of the building since they were a bit fiddly, I helped him fold the pieces and he stuck them all onto the base.

Sausage Sizzle...

When I was asking for advice about Oz on FB a couple of my friends mention sausage sizzle which is a slice buttered white bread with a sausage (I think it is supposed to BBQed), a squirt of sauce and onions. I figured this would be easy enough to recreate (bar the onions because I hadn't got any in) Ebi-kun loved it, he had it for tea with salad and an ANZAC bickie for afters.

Flaming galah!

Another Aussie post!

An old friend that I have known since I was knee high to a grasshopper, sent me this link when we were discussing Oz on FB. Looking through the site I thought it would be fun to do some Aussie slang, I went through the lists and realized that a lot of it is the same or very similar to British English but there were quite a few I didn't know. So I made up a sheet with matching cards, the word on one and the definition on the other and put coloured dots on the back of the matching pairs so he can self check his work. You can download the file HERE.*

I used to use  this method quite a lot when I was teaching new vocab back in my ESL teacher days, the students makes an educated guess at matching the words (this helps students break words apart, for example if they know the words triangle and tricycle and they are given the new word tripod they can make a guess that it is something involving 3 and so on). It took Ebi-kun four attempts to get them all matched correctly. Then we took it in turns picking a slang word and making a sentence with it, which of course resulted in a lot of giggling!

*the definitions are in British English so Americans may need to translate them again!

Dot art

We couldn't study Australia without doing some Aboriginal/indigenous Australian dot art. We started by getting on line and looking at some examples and then I printed out the symbols and their meanings from one of the many sites we looked at, sorry I don't remember which one. We got out the acrylic paints and cotton buds and I found some wood (actually unused shelves). Ebi-kun wanted to paint an kangaroo, so I helped by sketching the shape for him to start with.

We both agreed it was very relaxing doing this type of painting and I am sure we will be doing it again sometime soon. Here is Ebi-kuns kangaroo....

and of course, I had to have a go too, so here is my platypus....

Discovering Australasia....

Ebi-kun has been asking a lot about Australia recently so yesterday I found out all the things we have collected over the last few years. We have some great items from swaps and my friend Liv has sent us some great books and little animals. Ebi-kun started off by making the map, he traced around all the parts on different coloured card the cut them out and stuck them down and labelled it all. We will add the major cities today.

Then we decided to make ANZAC biscuits, I have a feeling they are not supposed to spread out quite like this, I have a sneaky suspicion that the recipe I used was an Aussie one and the cups are different to US cups, oh well, they taste OK! Those with eagle eyes will notice that the coconut is yellow, it was some left over from another cooking project!

Gifts from Cuba

Yasuyo recently returned from a trip Cuba and she bought us some goodies to 

go in our culture box, 

these little people are so cute!

 A selection of postcards and some other bits and bobs,

 the wooden cigar is so funny! Cuba is on my

list of places that I would like to visit....one day, when I am rich, sigh!

A swap from afar

A while back I made some gifts for a little girl in French Guiana, well after sending a few emails back and forth her mom and I decided to do a culture swap, we got the package the other day with some lovely things to add to our South American box. It included a pretty necklace, colouring book, beautiful picture book of native animals, a card game with the native animals on the cards, a CD of French kids songs and a recipe which sounds delicious but it uses papaya which I can't get hold of, any ideas on what I could substitute instead of papaya? the dish is a kind of gratin.

Thank you Vanessa for a great package and I hope mine has arrived by the time this is posted (I have scheduled this one!)

Africa II - books

He are a few books that we have been reading recently, in keeping with the Africa theme.

Africa is not a country Each page is dedicated to a different country in Africa and describes a typical day for the children who live there. It shows a the great range of diversity and touches on areas such as religion, diet, school and the kind of home people live in. As you work through the book it is as if you are working through the day as it starts with early morning chores and rituals for the kids at the beginning of the book and ends up with the evening meals and bedtime habits. It is a great book to use as a starting point for a country you want to study. When Ebi-kun got the village scene out, he looked through the book to find a picture like it and we decided it could be a village in Sudan.

Mama Panya's Pancakes, this is a cute story about a boy and him mother (who doesn't have much money) and their trip to the market, on the way the  boy keeps inviting everyone they bump into back to their place in the evening to have pancakes but poor mother is panicking because she hasn't enough money to buy food to feed them all. Turns out that everyone brings something along and they end up having a feast and a great party.

We all went on Safari, this is a counting book set in Tanzania, Ebi-kun enjoys this book because he gets to count in Swahili as well and English (he usually throws Japanese in too for good measure), we have read this book a thousand times, I am pretty sure I could read it to you right now, no need for the actually book, it's all here, in my head, and I think it will good when we get round to doing animals of Africa.

And last but certainly not least, Ebi-kuns new favourite book Goal, this a perfect tie-in with the world cup. Set in South Africa it is about a boy in the townships who has won a federation football for his good reading at school. The trouble is, there are bullies about who would love to get their hands on it. Him and his friends play on the street, they encounter the bullies....  It is a lovely story, inspiring and uplifting and well written, the parts where the boys are actually playing are written like a football commentator is writing it. Of course, Ebi-kun loves it and it also opened the opportunity to talk about bullies and life in a township.

Do you have any favourite books about Africa? If so, please share.

We are off for yochien observation day today, hubby took the day off today I suspect that is was as much to get away with getting up at 3am to watch the Japan game as it is to watch his son at yochien, he is currently crashed out on the sofa, snoring.... not for long.....

Africa I

With the world cup being on and you know how much my boy loves his footie, I thought it would be the perfect time to introduce Africa. Here are a few things we have done so far...

I cut out pieces of coloured card so that when they are layered they make the flag of South Africa, he got

out his flag book to compare the flags.

 working on the Africa puzzle map

 Now, a while ago I organised a couple of continent swaps and we got some great goodies back, (thanks you) this is one of the activities, there is an African village scene and then cut out of different people doing different jobs, it turned out to be a great conversation starter. He would ask me what the people were doing and why, one conversation went like this:
E-K: what is she doing?
Me: pounding grain to make flour
E-K: what about this woman?
Me: what do you think?
E-K: maybe making bread.
Me: yes, looks like it
E-K and him?
Me: putting the bread in the oven
E-K: why don't they use a bread machine like ours, it is much easier.
Me: good question, do you know how the bread machine works?
E-K: yes, you press the buttons
Me: so what makes it get hot to bake the bread
E-K: the buttons (looking at me as if I am daft)
Me: do you know what kind of energy the bread machine uses?
E-K: (big sigh, blimey my mom is slow) you put the flour and other things inside the machine and then press the BUTTONS and the BUTTONS make it hot and cook the bread and then it beeps when it is ready.
The conversation went on for quite a while and we talked about electricity and water supplies, all rather amusing.

He has also been using the 3 part flag cards, kids always seem to love maps, I know I did when I was a kid, maybe it the bright colours and simple designs that draws them to flags.

We Won...

After the trauma of Friday night it was lovely to wake up to an email from Zoe at Playing By The Book to say we had won her competition! and we got to pick which books we wanted to boot, I will show you when they arrive. I only discovered this blog a few months ago but Zoe comes up with some great ideas to go with the books she reads to her kids.

I LOVE this Barbapapa pod house and have it bookmarked as warmer weather activity, I am sure Ebi-kun would love it as a garden play house, if I can find a way to seal it.

We also got two parcels that day, a strawberry plant and jar of coffee from baa-chan and a swap parcel from Eli who lives in America but it Guatemalan so now we have some cute miniatures to add to the culture box, thank you Eli (and Stacey!).

Using Flickr as a Montessori resource

I love Flickr, it is a great way to store my pictures and share them with everyone, with the advantage of having different levels so you can make the pictures as private or public as you like.

We live in a small town and the town library isn't really up to much and obviously it is all Japanese, I would love to buy books for everything that Ebi-kun is interested but we don't have the space or the money, so this is my latest trick...Flickr.

Go to Flickr's main page, here. Then click on the search link....

Now click on the advanced search link....
Which will bring you to this page, now you can fill in what you want to search for and make sure your search is safe, although this is not 100% fool proof it is the best way to go, you can also set other search restrictions here. If you are looking for images to use other than just looking on screen you can select creative commons which is at the bottom of this page (couldn't manage to get it on the screen shot).
Then click the search button at the bottom of the page, that will bring up a new page full of images, click on slideshow and sit back and enjoy the show.

Ebi-kun is loving this, there are so many beautiful images but then you get the odd everyday shot thrown it too. I think this gives a better representation of a country than a book on say Canada. With Flickr you are seeing it through many peoples eyes and the range of subject matter is much greater.

Obviously this doesn't always work fantastically, I tried doing the same for polar bear and got some very odd images but some of those included images of blokes with 'I am a polar bear' written on their chests, this led to a discussion about why these fella's had done it, from the caption I could tell it was a global warming demo.

Do you use Flickr? If so, how do you make the most out of it?

Drawing

Having a broken arm hasn't stopped this kid from wielding a pencil, this is a game of ice hockey, I just love the guys skates and apparently they are all fat because of the padding :o)

As he was doing the continent work, I put on the North America music play list then when he finished I thought we would try out something new. I put on the song Take Me Home Country Road and had him close his eyes and listen to the music. When it was finished I asked him to draw a picture to represent the music, so here we have the blue skies, the mountains, trees, river and home!
It was a fun exercise, one that I think we will be doing again.

Continent work - North America

With the Olympics being on we decided to concentrate on North America next. Ebi-kun has been working with the map, here he placed all the pieces on the control sheet and then got out the basket of little objects that we have collected and tried to guess where each one was from, unfortunately we don't have anything from Central America. Many of the items we do have are from swaps, he was about half way through when I took the picture.
Then he got the postcards out, I pre-sorted them so that there were just North American cards in the box, again, many of these came from swaps. I didn't give him any help and got him to decode the cards, some had the country written on the stamp or the small text on the back, others on the front, he had to search the cards for clues. He put each card under the correct puzzle piece. If you want to bump up the amount of postcards you have, try post crossing but be warned, you will get one card from Finland for every other card you get - I don't know why, maybe the Finns just love sending postcards!

One of the small objects that caught ebi-kuns imagination was the dream catcher. We got onto google to find out about it's origins and then decided to make one ourselves. I was very much a joint effort with him only having one working arm at the moment but it turned out quite well. You can find how to make a dream catcher here

Olympics and North America

I was planning on doing Europe next but with the Olympics being on it seemed more sensible to make a start on North America. For the Olympics I used google to find some worksheets, colouring pages, mazes and dot to dots and made up a workbook. We have been practising our winter sports on the wii fit and I made an Olympic flag MTD.
Blue - blueberry yoghurt (yes, I know it looks more of a purple!)

Yellow - omlette

Black - black sesame spread on whole wheat crackers

Green - cucumber

Red - parma ham and tomatoes

Ebi-kun is a really S-L-O-W eater, he likes his food, it just takes him forever and a day to eat it, he does eat a bit quicker if I put it in muffin tin liners for some strange reason!

We also got the North America map out, in the playgroup we have quite a few members from America and Canada so I printed out little pictures of them then found where they were from and stuck them to the map. Ebi-kun was also excited to find the Dominican Republic because that is where my brothers girlfriend is from and Haiti because he had seen the news about the earthquake. He was far more interested in the places where he could make some kind of connection to.

Rainbow Snow

We actually had some snow the night before last, of course Ebi-kun couldn't wait to get out there and play in it. By scraping all the snow off the car and stealing some from the neighbours we managed to get enough to make two little snowmen. We tried to use chalk to mark the faces but it didn't work so well.

So I got out the food colouring, I think I saw this on a blog somewhere but I don't bookmark snow activities since we rarely get any and I can't remember where or when I saw it! Anyway, I mixed up red, yellow and blue and we used pipits to paint the snowmen...

The end result was colourful albeit a little bit scary :o)

I am off to pick up my permanent residence visa this morning, it has only taken the 9 months to process it!

Antarctica - ice

I got this idea from itty bitty love, perfect timing! I asked Ebi-kun what it would be like to be a penguin jumping into the icy water, he said cold. So we set out a bowl of icy water and asked him to put his hand in it for as long as possible, he managed 4 seconds, this is most certainly a grin and bear it picture...

Then we got a plastic glove and covered it with lard, this time he kept his hand in for much longer, he described it as being a little bit cold but not too bad, I admit, I had to give it a go too - the second part, I don't need to know what icy water really feels like :o)

We then tried some other ice experiments. For this one float an ice cube in the water then try and pick it up with a piece of string - it won't work. Now lay the string on the ice cube and sprinkle on some salt, could to ten and try again - taaadaaaaa
In another bowl we set out 3 ice cubes, put salt on one, coloured water on the second and left the other one as it was then we watched to see which melted first. If we were doing this in the summer we would also do more ice cooking and ice treasure. Do you have any cool ice experiments/activities?