Week 4: Germany!

This week we decided to indulge ourselves in some German culture.  If I had been planning ahead, I probably would have chosen to do Germany at the end of September or beginning of October to coordinate with some community events celebrating Oktoberfest or Unity Day.  But we had plenty of fun this week anyways! 

There were quite a few helpful websites that I used as I looked for preschooler-friendly German culture activities.  On http://www.travelforkids.com/Funtodo/Germany/germany.htm I found a list of some book and CD suggestions.  From this website's suggestions, I decided to get the Mr. Bach Comes to Call CD.  From the descriptions that I had read of the CD I was anticipating MonkeyD sitting and listening to the narration and music.  The storyline didn't hold her attention at all though, so we used the music as background music while we colored.  We haven't done any books on CD before, so maybe my kids are just used to having a visual when they're listening to something. 

http://ukgermanconnection.org/ is a fun website set up to connect school children from Germany and England.  I thought that MonkeyD and I would have more fun exploring it together than we did though.  She just didn't seem interested in the language games and quizzes.  I did find this fun craft idea there though, http://www.ukgermanconnection.org/kids/?location_id=1325.  It's for making a schultüte.  I explained to MonkeyD that this is a gift given to children on their first day of school and it's generally filled with small treats and school supplies.  At the end of the week I gave both of the girls a small schultüte.  I made and filled them with a fall/Halloween theme, but reminded MonkeyD of their real use in Germany.

There were also some fun links on this page, http://www.aupairinamerica.com/resources/kids/culture_corner/germany.asp,  that was put together by Au Pair in America.

 MonkeyD listened to the story of the Brementown Musicians on http://brementownmusicians.com/story_enter and we tried playing the game on that site also. 

 We put together a little toy man wearing his traditional lederhose from the free pattern on http://www.dltk-kids.com/world/germany/mlederhosen.htm.  MonkeyD tried to make a castle for him to live in with her blocks since we had seen pictures of German castles. 

There were some interesting short videos to watch on the BBC's website.  We watched Frau Holle, Pancake day in Germany, and A birthday out in a country park.  I see now that there are more to choose from if you do a search for German and filter by "primary".

MonkeyD recently started playing soccer through our local parks and recreation department, so we were sure to point out to her that soccer is a very popular sport in Germany.  And we had fun playing soccer together at the park on one of our family days. 

The German cuisine that we tried out included Black Forest Cake, schweineschnitzel, weinkraut, spaetzle with butter, schoko mac, lebkuchen (cookies), and apfelpfannekuchen (apple pancakes).  MonkeyD helped out where she could with the cooking.  The first three recipes were the responsibility of The Big Bad Dad, since he is the real chef in our family.  Of all the recipes, the only things that the girls were not big fans of were the weinkraut and the spaetzle. 

The recipe for lebkuchen (cookies) that we used was from the book The Usborne Internet-Linked Children's World Cookbook.  This is a great cookbook for trying recipes from around the world.  In addition to a recipe, they have short paragraphs, photographs and internet links about the country that the recipe came from.  It explained that lebkuchen are traditionally Christmas cookies.  I explained the traditional use, but since we're getting close to Halloween, we used our Halloween cookie cutters for our cookies. 

For our apfelpfannekuchen, I just used our regular Bisquick pancake recipe and added apples.  I did find another great kids' cookbook called, The Kids' Multicultural Cookbook by Deanna F. Cook, with a recipe that we could have used.  This cookbook also has recipes from countries around the world and it includes fun illustrations and some fun facts about each country. We tried our pancakes with applesauce, as we read that suggestion in the book and it was also mentioned in the short video we watched on the BBC's website.  I might be adding these two cookbooks to our Christmas wishlist since we can only keep them from the library for just so long :-) 

Before we read any stories we looked through the pictures of a book about Germany that I picked out from the juvenile non-fiction section of our library.  MonkeyD prefers not to read those books though.  The rest of our booklist this week was fairy tales and folk tales that were retold from the Brother's Grimm.   

• The Bremen Town Musicians and Other Animal Tales From Grimm retold by Doris orgel.  MonkeyD seemed to really enjoy this book, I thought that the illustrations were well done.  It includes six short tales, and MonkeyD insisted on hearing all of them in one sitting!
• Iron Hans retold by Stephen Mitchell.
• One Gift Deserves Another adapted by Joanne Oppenheim.
• The Ragamuffins adapted by Bernadette Watts.
• The Brothers Grimm The Brave Little Tailor by Eve Tharlet. 
• We read several versions of Little Red Riding Hood.  The versions that we read were: Little Red Cap by the Brothers Grimm, Little Red Riding Hood by William Wegman, and Little Red Riding Hood by Candice Ransom.  I thought it was kind of funny, we haven't gone to many of the storytimes held at our library because of the age difference in our girls and trying to pick a program that will be appropriate for both of them is difficult.  Anyways, I decided to bring the girls to the preschool storytime on Wednesday because I saw that they were doing fairytales this month.  And, what a nice surprise, the fairytale they were reading this week was Little Red Riding Hood.  After reading the story together, they had a craft set up.  The craft was decorating a little picnic basket made out of a paper bag and coloring and cutting out some pictures of food for the basket.  Afterwards, we got to keep a copy of the book.   

   

Week 3: Russia! (Short side-trip to Tanzania and Kenya)

This week MonkeyD pointed at Russia on our map when choosing our new culture to explore.  So, as is becoming my ritual, I spent Sunday evening on the computer looking for ideas to learn about Russia.

On Monday I was sick, but my wonderful husband stayed home and took over our Russian experience for the day.  Since he is, without a doubt, the better chef in our family, he indulged us in a few Russian meals.  He started us out in the morning with a brunch of deruny - potato pancakes.   MonkeyD was not completely impressed with the deruny, but Lil' Pistol couldn't eat enough of them.  The previous night, The Big Bad Dad had made and frozen a large batch of pelmini, so we had those for dinner.  With this dish, MonkeyD ate and ate, (how could she not?  she got to use her favorite condiment, ketchup!).  Lil' Pistol was not interested in dinner though.  I think that the pelmini was the perfect hot food for me that day. In the evening, The Big Bad Dad, assisted by his mini-chefs, made a delicious Russian apple pie. 

One evening we made Babushka dolls out of a paper towel roll.  I cut the roll into pieces of decreasing size and rolled some of them tighter so that they could fit inside one another.  Then, MonkeyD decorated them and played with them for a while.  I had also come across this website, http://mssscrafts.com/crafts/matryushka/, that has a template to use for making Babushka Dolls. 

We had a long booklist of Russian folktales.  The Gigantic Turnip by Aleksei Tolstoy and Niamh Sharkey, Bit by Bit by Steve Sanfield, Clever Katya retold by Mary Hoffman, Baboushka retold by Arthur Scholey, Baba Yaga retold by Eric A. Kimmel, Bearhead by Eric A Kimmel, and The Firebird retold by Demi.  We looked at and discussed the pictures in the book Looking at Russia by Jillian Powell - although we didn't actually read it together.  We also enjoyed the stories of  Max Moves to Moscow by Winifred Riser, and  Castle on Hester Street by Linda Heller.   The first is about a dog who moves to Moscow.  For this book we paid attention to the cathedrals in the illustrations and made note of the long winter season.   The second is about a husband and wife that moved to the New York from Russia many years ago. 

We watched three dvds this week.  The first two, The Firebird and The Fool and the Flying Ship are based on traditional folktales that we had also read.  We watched the versions created by Rabbit Ears Storybook Collection.  The third dvd we watched was Little Pim the Panda: Russian.  This is a language learning program.  We watched the "Eating and Drinking" video, which is the first of the three videos in their Russian collection. 

On Wednesday we made a side trip in to northern Tanzania and Kenya as we visited a nearby museum, The Spurlock Museum,.  In their Around the World Wednesdays art program for kids, the girls each made a Maasai necklace and earrings using paper plates and beads.   They were shown, allowed to touch and even try on an actual Maasai beaded wedding necklace and earring.  This was our first visit to Spurlock Museum, but we will be visiting again and touring the exhibits since we hadn't given ourselves enough time to do that during this trip.

Week 2: Greenland!

On Sunday night MonkeyD looked at the map and chose our next country to be Greenland.  I don't know much about Greenland myself, so I thought this could prove to be difficult.  I spent some time at the computer researching Greenland and looking up books available at our local library.   

Two of the websites that I found to be user friendly and helpful for research were Greenland.com and Go North! 

The Enchanted Learning website had an Inuit wooden mask to paint online, MonkeyD spent a while playing around with that.  I also found a website with lots of great pictures to print out for free, First-School.  From their selection, I printed out pictures of several of the animals that could be found in Greenland (not the penguins or the albatross!  :-)) and gave them to MonkeyD to paint with her water colors.  I also printed out the picture of the letter I with an igloo and the letter I with an icicle, but she wasn't interested in doing anything with those.  She isn't into coloring with crayons or markers much, but I thought she would like painting.  She was done after only painting three of the pictures, but I was happy because in addition to seeing some of the animals that are in Greenland she presented an opportunity for me to tell her about camouflage.  After painting each animal she asked me if it was the color that it usually is in Greenland.  So then we got to talk about their colors and that in the case of the ermine that she painted brown, that would be the color that he would be in the summer.  But in the winter his coat would be white to help him camouflage with the snow. 

I found a website to print out flags of the countries that we've learned about so far at Coloring Castle.  These printables were fun because they had a color key to help with coloring in the right colors.  MonkeyD wasn't too interested in coloring these though, as I mentioned she isn't into crayons and markers much.  Lil' Pistol got ahold of the flag coloring pages and added her best scribbles though :-)

One of the books at we borrowed from the library was Crafts for Kids Who Are Wild About Polar Life by Kathy Ross.  This book had a lot of fun ideas for crafts to make about animals in the arctic (and antarctic) regions.  Based on the ease of the crafts and the materials that we had available (and the amount of time before Lil' Pistol would wake up), MonkeyD and I made an arctic tern one day and a walrus mask another day.

Another day I let MonkeyD play with a couple trays worth of ice cubes on a cookie sheet.  She was making igloos.  We had trouble getting the cubes to stack, but that didn't hinder her creativity.  She played with them on and off until they were completely melted. 

We read many books this week.  Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I found any books on MonkeyD's level that were directly about the (current) lifestyles of the people in Greenland.  However, I do feel think that through her curiosity and attention to the wonderful illustrations in these books, she probably got a feel for some parts of the culture. For example, several of the books showed the characters wearing their mukluks or mentioned them.  The book, I is for Inuksuk explained what an Inuksuk was (a stone tower used as a guide) and then there were illustrations of Inuksuk in The Three Snow Bears, so we were able to point these out and remember what they were.  The animals that we had talked about in our painting activities were in several of the books so it was rewarding to be able to say that she had painted a picture of that animal or done a craft about it.  Many of the stories had pictures of sleds pulled by teams of dogs so we talked about that being a way to get around in the snow.  Some of the books also incorporated pictures of the Aurora borealis, so although it wasn't mentioned in the story, we talked about it.  In addition to some stories, we also read quite a few books that were just about the polar animals.  Here is our book list:

 Mama, Do You Love Me? by Barbara M. Joosse,

Kumak's Fish by Michael Bania,

 The Big Fuzzy by Caroline Castle,

 The Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett (a fun Goldilocks and the Three Bears type of story),

 The Brave Little Seal by Rudyard Kipling,

 Baby Polar Bear by Aubrey Lang,

 What a Viking! by Mick Manning & Brita Granstrom (didn't really mention Greenland much, but I pointed out that at one time Vikings had been in Greenland),

 I is for Inuksuk by Mary Wallace,

 Alego by Ningeokuluk Teevee (written in Inuktitut and English, introduces many Inuktitut words),

 Over in the Arctic Where the Cold Winds Blow by Marianne Berkes, and

 Way Up in the Arctic by Jennifer Ward  (these last two were very cute and written to the rhythm of "Over In the Meadow", so they can be sung to a familiar tune).

I thought that Polar Lands by Margaret Hynes would have been a good book for MonkeyD, but we never got around to looking at it.  Maybe if she was a little older she would have liked it.  It has large colorful pictures of animals from the arctic and antarctic as well as short paragraphs about how animals adapt, what they eat and other facts about the polar regions. 

We also talked about the tundra and watched a relevant short clip on PBS EekoWorld.  This video clip re-emphasized some things we had read in our stories including that in the winter it is dark all day long and in the summer it is light all day long.  The following week I happened to come across a DVD at the library about polar animals, National Geographic's Really Wild Animals Polar Prowl.  I added this to our Greenland activities. 

A couple of books suggested doing some sort of paper snowflake craft.  I just couldn't bring myself to make any snowflakes since it was early fall here though.  Also, we didn't try out any Greenlandic recipes.  I had trouble finding any traditional recipes that used ingredients I could find at our local grocery stores.  I read a few suggestions to try out some Danish recipes, since there is quite a lot of Danish cuisine in Greenland.  But, we didn't go that route, for whatever reason. 

During this week I started wondering if what I'm doing - as far as trying to teach MonkeyD about other cultures - is making any sense to her.  Sometimes I get caught up in thinking that she should be learning facts, like "this is the capital...this is where it is located...these are some of the words spoken there...this is what the weather is like there...etc."  Then I realized, well, I am exposing her to new things - things beyond the normal peanut butter and jelly sandwich routine of our lives.   She is learning that there are many different ways of life around the world.  That's my original and ultimate goal anyways.  Then, while she was playing with her ice cubes, she had a toy dinosaur peek between the cubes and she laughed and said, "He sees some plants growing outside but he is surprised because not much grows in Greenland."  And I realized she is listening and taking things in.  I told her that in the summer a few things can grow, but not a lot.  She said, "Yeah.  He just sees two plants."  So maybe she is getting some little 'facts' out of it too :-)