Week 9: Brazil!

Our family has had a long break from our global travels because we've been so busy.  We have a new member in our family now!  We will respectfully refer to the new little brother as Mr. President.  He was born in late December.  Adjusting to having a newborn in the house had made our lives a little crazy for a while.  Fortunately, Grandma came to stay with us and has been wonderful in helping us continue to enrich our lives with global experiences. 
For Christmas, MonkeyD received several Dover sticker paper doll books from a good friend of ours.  Each book has a paper doll from a certain country and related repositionable sticker outfits and accessories.   I asked MonkeyD to choose from those books to decide which country we would learn about next and she chose Camina From Brazil.  She really loves playing with the stickers in the books and changing the dolls outfits. 

This website, http://www.easyfunschool.com/article1080.html,  had a lot of helpful links for finding out more about Brazil.

Grandma has been doing the cooking for our family lately.  She did an awesome job with the Brazilian recipes that The Big Bad Dad had found. One night we had beef strogonoff.  It was delicious.  I was wondering, is strogonoff really a Brazilian dish?  According to the author of Maria's Cookbook (where this recipe came from), "everyone in Brazil loves the dish and has their favorite recipe."  Coincidentally, when I mentioned to a friend of mine that we had beef stroganoff while learning about Brazil, she said that she had a friend from Brazil that was always making stroganoff.  Since my girls are not big on eating meat, they pushed the beef aside.They did like the sauce with the rice though. 

Another dish Grandma made was chicken pie (Torta de frango).  The grown-ups liked this dish, but the kids didn't care for it.  She also made pork chops (bisteca de porco frita), rice and beans.   

The Big Bad Dad made avocado smoothies (vitaba) for us one morning.  We had never had avocado with sugar, we usually think of eating avocados with salty chips in guacamole.  Everyone except MonkeyD liked this smoothie.  The Big Bad Dad also made us fried bananas (banana frita) which we all loved. 

With a new baby in the house, I haven't necessarily been the one that gets to do storytime with the girls.  So, I'm asking MonkeyD to help me summarize which books she enjoyed and what they are about.  The books in the "I liked it" pile are:

Cassio's Day by Maria de Fatima Campos. This was the first book we read, to introduce ourselves to Brazil.  It follows a little boy named Cassio through his day in his Brazilian village.  We discussed what was similar about his day and MonkeyD's day by talking about what we recognized in the photos. 
Count Your Way through Brazil by Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson.  This book has a summary of some aspects of Brazil such as, the language, popular sports, and animals.  Some of the discussion in the book is above MonkeyD's interest level though. 

We read a couple of books about the jungle and rainforests.  These were not specific to Brazil, so some of the animals in them are not actually in Brazil's rainforests. 
Jungle Animals by Jinny Johnson and Nicki Palin.  This is a somewhat interactive book because it has questions on a flap that opens to reveal the answers. 
A Rain Forest ABC by Amanda Doering.  This book has a beautiful photograph and a short sentence on each page. 

The folktales that MonkeyD liked included:
The Dancing Turtle by Pleasant DeSpain.  This is about a turtle that gets caught to be made into soup, but she manages to trick some children into letting her out of the cage. 

The Great Snake by Sean Taylor.  This is a book with a collection of stories from the Amazon.  The stories are quite long, but MonkeyD didn't seem to mind. 



MonkeyD and Lil Pistol love to have dance parties in their bedroom, so they really enjoyed the CD that we listened to, Brazilian Playground by Putumayo Kids.  They used it for several dance performances and parties.  Since the songs selected for this CD were so perfect for my kids, I think that I will look into other products by Putumayo Kids. They have several CDs on their website. 


At the end of our focus on Brazil, MonkeyD and I attended a small (free!) performance of Brazilian music at our local library.  I wish that I could have brought Lil Pistol too because she would have enjoyed it, but she needed her nap at that time.  MonkeyD enjoyed the music and danced a little to it.  She told me it sounded like the music that they have been playing in their bedroom :-)