Geography Studies Videos Giveaway!

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED!  THANKS!!!!

I have 3 fun Global Wonders videos we used during our Galloping the Globe studies last year to give away!  These are really cute.  My boys really enjoyed them as an "in-flight video" on our way to each country we studied.

Click on each picture to find out more on each dvd.







To enter, leave a comment telling me which one you would choose and why.  I will draw 3 different names randomly, on August 28th.  US Shipping Only.

I love Homeschool Creations and I love it when she hosts a Curriculum Clean- Out!  Fun times!

Mexico Studies

We are continuing our studies with Galloping the Globe.  We have had a fun couple of weeks studying the country of Mexico!

We mapped the country and the capital city.  Then we watched a video on Mexico called Global Wonders - Mexico. I had bought several of these for cheap at the beginning of the year!

We painted flags of Mexico.  Samuel really gets into the paint!





[caption id="attachment_2299" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="This is a Betty Crocker "Warm Delights" bowl that make great paint bowls! I got them for free with coupons. :) The kids love them, and I just love to recycle containers!"][/caption]

We talked about the mission trip Chad and I took to Mexico.  I made a notebook with pictures and other memories from that trip.    It was such a fun time.  We still keep in contact with our friends there.  The boys enjoyed looking at the book.  My how Chad and I have changed!

We watched some Spanish music videos on YouTube.  I think their favorite was this funny one! We also watched a few videos on Discovery Education.

We went to a huge Mexican market in the city with a friend who is of Mexican descent.  She helped us pick out some fun things to try.   Andrew thought he was really in Mexico!  They were really intrigued with all the odd things they saw...cow tongue, whole fish, pig's feet, cactus in a jar.

We came home that evening and made a delicious meal!  I made tortilla chips served with homemade salsa I had frozen last year, and fajitas with this lovely piece of skirt steak bought from the market.  We even had lime tea, which we loved having in Mexico!





We read Saturday Market.  It's a great book about the open-air markets in Mexico.  Great illustrations, too!

Then we looked a few books on Mexican foods.  We made Watermelon Fresca from the Funky Chicken Enchiladas book.  We made Mexican Wedding Cakes from the book called The People of Mexico and Their Food.



We ate at a Mexican restaurant with Nana.  Andrew has lots of chips and three tacos!

Andrew was exposed to quite a bit of Spanish.  I remember quite a bit.  They always thought that was funny when I would speak it.  Also, Andrew had a couple Spanish lessons with his co-op class.  That worked out well!

We made a yarn bowl from an idea in this fun book.



For lunch one day I made PB&J Enchiladas.  I got this idea from the DK First Atlas.





We made a super easy and quick pinata.  Take a paper lunch sack, have your children decorate it, fill it and voila!  They loved it!  I filled with confetti, mints, chocolate and money.  Bless Mexico for giving us chocolate!!  We hung it in a tree and let the boys take turns.  After about 5 hits, it finally busted open.









We celebrated Easter in a fun way I remember doing in Spanish class!  Cascarones! They loved blowing out the eggs, decorating them and especially cracking them on each others heads!  It was a great way to conclude our study on Mexico!







Favorite Literature Picks:

The Old Lady and the Birds


Going Home

Butterfly Boy

A story from the Usborne Stories From Around the World mini book

Reference Books:

A Look at Mexico

First Reports - Mexico

Countries of the World-Mexico

People of Mexico-South of the Border

I think we could do Mexico for the rest of the year!!

USA Studies

Doing a study on America has been the least exciting.  That's pretty sad, because all my resources are right here!  Maybe I am losing some steam.  I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year so I would be more motivated to do something (as opposed to towards Spring when I am really getting tired!).  And maybe it was because I had birthday party on my mind.  I don't know.  But I do know we will be able to do a whole lot more, especially if we decide to do Cantering the Country geography curriculum in the next few years!

Here's what we did basically for the month of January...

We started off by building the Melissa and Doug USA map puzzle Nana gave us.  I love their puzzles!





We requested info on states that they were interested in.  Those included Florida, Texas, Washington, and Arkansas.  We looked over several maps that came with those packages.  They were, of course, very interested in where Chad and I lived in Texas and where they were born in Arkansas.  I was able to show them the places we have been and the places that we will go as a family some day!

We read books about the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty and Mt Rushmore.  The boys thought their Playdoh sculpture was hilarious!

We colored USA flags and watched a video on Old Glory.



For dinner one night Andrew chewed his toast in the shape of the USA.  This is the night we had Sam's favorite...bacon!





Cowboys were a part of our studies, which tied beautifully into our cowboy themed birthday party.  They drew the cutest cowboys I've ever seen using the Usborne I Can Draw People book.





One sweet little book we read was Across America, I Love You.  I choked up several times reading it to them!

Eat Your Way Around the World gave Fried Chicken, corn on the cob and brownies as a meal from the United States.  My boys loved that, of course!  The USA doesn't have a very distinct food culture.  So we did a little study on one of their favorite things to eat...Mac and Cheese.  From Wikipedia, "Its popularity in the United States has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson serving it at a White House dinner in 1802.  It has been popular in the UK since the Victorian era."  Interesting!

Missionary Stories with the Millers is always a favorite read for our GTG studies.  Andrew loves to sit and listen to these.  Both him and Ethan are real interested in listening.  We like to do these as a family at night.  There were three stories based out of the USA.

I purchased the Usborne Stories From Around the World book for Andrew for Christmas.  They enjoyed the story of "The Magic Doll"

We learned about squirrels.  We read a few stories from the library, colored a squirrel, and watched a Discovery Ed video about them. We also got to learn about them at our field trip this past Wednesday to the nature center about 30 min from here.  We took an extended field trip to surprise Mamaw and Papaw that day!





Well, I guess we did more than I thought!

Christmas at School

We brought home so many books on Christmas around the world.  We have read a lot of them, but we focused on just a few countries.  I used Galloping the Globe as my guide.  This is a good website for information about Christmas in other countries, as GTG suggests.  Discovery Education videos were used for each country, including a series of videos called "Christmas Tales from Foreign Lands."  I liked the story about "Busy Befana," an Italian folklore.

Africa

An African Christmas

Reggae Christmas Music on YouTube - that was fun!!

We made Chin Chin, an African Christmas treat.



Mexico

Too Many Tamales

Las Posadas

The Legend of the Poinsettia - we made poinsettias to hang on our little tree



We made Mexican ring cookies and mini pinata party favors that we took to a neighbor friend.



The boys woke up to treasures in their shoes like the children in Mexico receive.  They thought that was hilarious!



Japan

We loved the book Tree of Cranes.  It's a very sweet little story.

We  made fans to hang on our little tree.



YouTube videos on Christmas in Japan.  The boys always love hearing the Japanese speak and sing!

Favorite Christmas Literature Picks...

The B- I- B-L-E!!  Where the Christmas story is told, whether or not the whole world celebrates Christ's birth!

Little Drummer Boy

The Little Reindeer - we learned to draw Reindeer from our art book.  They turned out so cute!

What Star Is This

What is Christmas?

God Gave Us Christmas

We also enjoyed learning about the different symbols of Christmas and hanging those symbols on our little tree.  Our lapbook for that turned out well!





A great book for Advent:

The Adventure of Christmas: Helping Children Find Jesus in Our Holiday Traditions

So lots of reading, which is just fine with me!  There's nothing like reading all cuddled up by the Christmas tree!

We have some more to do before we take our Christmas break.

I have lots to do!

Our India Studies

I should have posted this last week, but I had too much to do!  We studied the country of India for 2 weeks in November.

We began our trip to India by watching Global Wonders India.

The boys painted the flag of India and colored a map.  Andrew chose to color his with many different colors because Indians love color.

Ramboli art was done by using printouts here and colored rice.  After that art project, we had some chai tea with Spiderman.

We learned about tigers using some books we had here at home, as well as some from the library.  Then we learned how to draw them from a book called I Can Draw Animals.  Here are their finished drawings...



Our Indian dinner was Naan bread, chicken and Indian rice.  We all liked it a lot.  The Naan bread was really good and easy to make.  The boys had butter and honey on theirs.  The fun part was eating with our fingers like they do in India.  I served it on this green plate to represent a banana leaf (their plates for special occasions).



Our favorite literature books were One Grain of Rice, The Story of Little Babaji, and The Road to Mumbai.

A great reference book for the country of India was I is for India.

We watched several YouTube videos and videos from Discovery Education on Indian culture and tigers.

Although it has nothing to do with India, Ethan really enjoyed practicing letters using Daddy's shaving cream.

We will begin Christmas Around the World using GTG this week!

Our Japan Studies

We took 3 weeks to study the country of Japan.  There was so much to learn and do that I couldn't cut it short to fit it into just 2 weeks!

A good friend of mine lived in Japan for 6 years.  She was able to help me a lot.  We visited a fun Japanese market in Indy.  We brought back all sorts of fun things to try!  The boys loved the drinks you see here.  They come in a glass bottle with a marble in the top.  Sounds strange, I know.  But it's cool.  You'll have to try them sometime!  Also, the whistle candies were a hit.



Discovery Education video clips on Japan, including "Yoshi, the Lantern Maker" and Yoko Videos.  One Yoko cartoon was about a Japanese toy called a Taketombo.  The boys loved it and wanted one, but I didn't know where to find such a thing.  When we went to the Halloween party where we have co-op, guess what they received?!  We had a lot of fun with it and thanked God for this little gift He gave to us.  I love witnessing God do such precious things for my children.  I love the love they see that God has for them.

We painted Japan's flag and also a Japanese fan.  They are always up for painting!

We made Yaki-Soba.  We loved it.  The kids liked it ok.  At least they ate it!  And then they laughed at their new name for it...Yucky Soba!

We also made Soba noodles.  The boys just loved eating the raw buckwheat noodles!

Japanese Wood Block Printing didn't turn out that great, but we had fun doing it!



We practiced some Origami.  We spent half of a day having fun with that!  One of our favorites that we worked on together was the Fox Box from this book.  Ethan put a little Reese Cup inside to surprise Daddy.



We read about Hiaku Poems.  The book said not to focus on the 17 syllables, but to focus on simple 3-line poem about nature.  So that's what we did.  This one Andrew's first one:

Leaves wiggling.

Tree lost its leaves.

The woodpecker pecks.

Some literature favorites were:  Little Oh, The Boy of the Three Year Nap, Grandfather's Journey, and A Carp for Kimoko.

We made a volcano using a kit here.  The kids loved this YouTube video on volcanoes.

We are trying to get started this Monday morning.  We will be headed to India this afternoon. :)

We had a fun weekend.  It was absolutely gorgeous!  Chad's mom took A & E, so we had somewhat of a quiet Saturday evening.  We rented a really cute movie.  It was a chic flic  since Chad was long overdue for one!  Last night we had a get together here with 3 other couples and their kiddos.  I had a meeting to attend at church and didn't get back until everyone was already here.  I am so thankful for such great girlfriends that took over in the kitchen!  We had a great time just being together.  It was the perfect night for a campfire.

Our South Africa Studies

We had a fun time studying the country of South Africa these last 2 weeks.  Some fun things we did were:

Read all kinds of books about South Africa and Elephants.  Some of the favorites were Little Big Ears, My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken and Me, Hello World, Elephant Familes, and South Africa.

Created an Elephant lapbook





Made African Necklaces out of straws and construction paper



Painted the country's flag



Made Elephant Ears - Andrew's been begging for these since his trip to the fair!  They really enjoyed these.  The recipe made so many that we passed them out to all the neighbors.  Look at all that powdered sugar Ethan put on there!



Watched Elephant Tales DVD from Redbox

We are off to Japan tomorrow.  That should be a fun one, too!  Please say a prayer that we can get started right.  I feel like I am coming down with something.  I have had a cough for a month now...just at night and in the mornings.  I woke up feeling pretty crummy this morning, so I didn't go to church.  This evening my chest has really been hurting.  Bleh!