Week 5: England!

This week I asked MonkeyD which country she wanted to learn about.  I didn't actually expect an answer, but sometimes it's fun asking a question to see what a three year old's answer will be.  She surprised me and instantly responded, "London."  She had just watched the new Tinkerbell movie and Tinkerbell's trip to London was fresh in her mind :-)  So, we embarked upon our exploration of the England. 

I thought that learning about England would be overwhelming because of a surplus in information available.  But, I didn't actually find that to be the case.  Most of my Google searches for "English culture", "England customs", etc., gave me results geared towards people in foreign countries that are trying to learn the English language.

MonkeyD has been enjoying roaming about the BBC's children's website, The BBC's CBeebies, playing games and watching their video clips for several months now.  Without directly meaning to, I think that this website gives her a British experience through the cartoon characters' accents and some of the words that they use that we don't normally use.

We also explored http://projectbritain.com/, a guide to Britich life, customs and culture. 

Our librarians were very helpful and the books that we brought home with us included:

• The Inside-Outside Book of London by Roxie Munro - which doesn't tell a story, but is just illustrations of some of the famous places of London.  
• Madeline in London by Ludwig Bemelmans - Madeline journeys to London to visit her friend.  The illustrations depict some of the things that we had been talking about for London such as the palace guards, tea time, London Bridge, double decker buses and the British flag. 
• The Secret Staircase and Autumn Story by Jill Barklem.  These stories seem a little long for MonkeyD's age, but she surprised me by staying interested in them and requesting them more than once.  They are part of a series about some mice that live in a hedgerow in England.  As written on the book jacket, the author's "interest in natural history and traditional rural customs and crafts has spilled over into these chronicles of hedgerow life."
• Dodsworth in London by Tim Egan.  This was one of my favorites of the books that we read this week as far as introducing things from London.  It's about Dodsworth, a mole, who takes a trip to London who mixes up his duck with the royal duck of England.  Several facts about London's landmarks are mentioned and illustrated throughout the short story.
• Paddington Bear and Paddington Bear in the Garden by Michael Bond.  These books didn't particularly mention anything about English culture, but it was a good time to introduce MonkeyD to the classic Paddington books.  This week was her first introduction to Madeline books too! 

The movies that we watched were Mary Poppins, 101 Dalmations II Patch's London Adventure and Mickey's Seeing the World. 

We didn't get very crafty this week, but MonkeyD and Grandma did put together the Bobby from DLTK's website. 

We planned a few of our meals and snacks based on suggestions in Cooking the English Way by Barbara Hill.  We followed this cookbook's recipes for our English breakfast of mushrooms on toast (except we had it as lunch!), for our Hearty Autumn Hot Pot dinner, and for the scones we made for an afternoon tea.  At our afternoon tea we had English breakfast tea, but also a fruity raspberry pomegranate tea, as I thought that might be more appealing to MonkeyD.  We also had some Cadbury Digestives with our tea.  Fresh from the oven scones with jam and butter went over very well at our house!  

One evening we had shepherd's pie for dinner.  Ours may not have been a very traditional English style though.  We were in the Halloween mood and followed the Kraft recipe for Scary Skillet Shepherd's Pie.  We only followed the recipe loosely, using what we had on hand, but whether traditional or not, it was yummy! 

We also had a fish and chips dinner - the simplest version.  This meal went over very well.  I just bought frozen fish sticks and french fries...I mean chips!  We all enjoyed our chips with salt and vinegar.

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.