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 :-)

Week 8: New Zealand!

Our weeks are very loosely defined.  Sometimes they start and end 7 days apart, other times they are only 4 days long or extend a few extra days. 

This week we didn't get started on things right away and were busy with preparations for going out of town for Thanksgiving, so we were not quite as involved as some previous weeks. 

When we mentioned choosing a country, MonkeyD ran to look at the globe again.  It's nice to see that she is enjoying that part of our project.  I think her choices are made based on the way the country is represented on the globe.  We have a small gem-stone globe, sort of like the ones here: http://www.1worldglobes.com/1WorldGlobes/GemstoneGlobes/gt150gmb.html.  Regardless of the reason, the choice was New Zealand.

We flipped through the pages of National Geographic's New Zealand by Barbara Jackson, just to look at pictures. 

The only folktale that I found at our library for MonkeyD's level was Punga The Goddess of Ugly by Deborah Nourse Lattimore.  MonkeyD and I both really enjoyed this story and we referred to it several times when topics came up that had been mentioned in the book.  It's about two Maori girls that must learn to properly perform the haka dance.  MonkeyD had fun demonstrating her version of a haka for her dad, my mom and me. 

We looked up youtube videos of people performing the haka.  Two of the videos that we enjoyed were http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BoNmpvkavo and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7pMvn5_3Vw&feature=related  Both of these videos were a little bit scary for MonkeyD though. 


We made a lunch based on the recipe and suggestions given in The Kids' Multicultural Cookbook by Deanna F Cook. We had Paraoa Parai (Maori Bread).  Before we ate I gave both of the girls mokos on their chins using an eyebrow pencil.   We would have included a kiwi parfait too, but kiwis were too difficult to find in the grocery stores.  Perhaps this was because of the time of year or something. 

Week 7: Iran!

MonkeyD spun the globe and picked Iran to be our focus country this week.

 

We watched the DVD The Little Travelers Iran  towards the end of the week, but I wish that we had used it as an introduction to the country.  This is the first video we have watched from this series, but I will be sure to look for their other videos in the future.  It's a 40 minute tour of Iran, narrated by two little girls.  They have a very interesting blog as well, http://thelittletravelers.typepad.com/.

 

I tried to take the easy route to trying out some Middle Eastern food by buying some hummus.  (I know, I know!  Why buy hummus when its simple to make fresh, yadda yadda...but I have actually attempted making fresh hummus in the past and managed to fail miserably, so I decided to buy the canned version that happened to be in the International Foods aisle at the grocery store).  It was pretty tasty.  But more spicy than I expected.  MonkeyD tried a little bite and pointed out that it was too spicy for her.  Lil' Pistol shocked me by eating more than one helping with her little crackers.  Then all of the sudden she started crying and wiping at her mouth.  I guess the spice got to her!  The Big Bad Dad pointed out the words "HOT!  SPICY!" to me on the can when I told him the story.  Oops!  Sorry kids! 



Baghlava



 

Fortunately, The Big Bad Dad was in the cooking mood over the weekend, so we sampled a few different dishes.  The first was Baghlava.  We got the recipe from the book Cooking the Middle Eastern Way by Alison Behnke.  We have used the cookbooks in this series for a couple of countries now and I highly recommend them.  They give a brief introduction to the country or geographical area at the beginning of the book.  Then they give a menu example and corresponding recipes for each meal of the day.  The last section of the book describes a few holidays or festivals and some typical recipes for those occasions. 

 

We brought our Baghlava to a party and it went over very well.  Lil' Pistol had helped me shell the pistachios and MonkeyD had helped The Big Bad Dad with some of the measuring, mixing, layering ingredients and buttering the layers.  She had also gone with him to the international foods store that we just discovered in our community, World Harvest Foods (The Big Bad Dad said this is one of his new favorite stores!).  Strangely, MonkeyD refused to sample the Baghlava.  Lil' Pistol followed her big sister's example, probably thinking that her big sister was onto some evil plot of the grown-ups to trick them into eating something bad.  But, the next day, when Lil' Pistol thought she was being sneaky, she sampled some of the Baghlava and must have liked it because she kept "sneaking" some more.

 



Kookoo-e Gol-e Kalem



The next day we tried out Kookoo-e Gol-e Kalem.  This was a vegetarian cauliflower dish.  Unfortunately, this dish didn't taste as good to us as it smelled.  The fun part of this meal was that we ate on the floor, like we saw them do in the Little Travelers video.  MonkeyD thinks it is so much fun to eat on a blanket on the floor!  She was in the greatest mood as she set the dishes out for us and directed us each to our place.  We tried to find a traditional Iranian music channel to listen to on Pandora, but I don't think we got the right one.  It was fun way to eat, but definitely a messy experience with Lil' Pistol dropping sticky rice all over the place.



Chelow kabab with chicken



 

Another meal that we had was Chelow kabab.  I think that all of us thought this rice dish was delicious. 



Persian pistachio nougat



 

The last homemade Persian treat that we had was Persian pistachio nougat.

We finished off our Iranian culinary experience with some sherbet.  This may have been a bit of a stretch, but I had read that the idea for the sherbet that we eat here originated in Iran with a sweetened fruit juice, http://www.answers.com/topic/sherbet .

 

We concluded our introduction to Iran week with a little field trip to a local imported rug gallery, Eastern Rug Gallery.  We asked to have the rugs from Iran pointed out to us.  We were also shown rugs from other areas of the world.  MonkeyD showed me which ones she liked and we talked a little bit about the different colors and patterns in them.

 

The books that we read this week were:

• The Rich Man and the Parrot retold by Suzan Nadimi - We enjoyed this colorfully illustrated retelling of a tale by Rumi. 
• The Legend of the Persian Carpet by Tomie DePaola - This was a fun story about the beautiful Persian carpets.  It piqued our interest in Perisan rugs and added to our trip to the imported rug gallery. 
• The Earth Shook by Donna Jo Napoli - I wasn't too excited about this story - for our purposes.  It was a little too dark to read to my not-quite-four-year-old.  If only there were time to read every book alone before reading it to the kids.  It's about a little girl whose home is destroyed by an earthquake.  When she wakes up the people are all gone but she meets some animals.  Each animal threatens her.  In the end, she makes peace with all the animals though. 
• Count Your Way Through Iran by Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson - I thought this book would be a great, simple introduction to some things from Iran (like the tar instrument, some animals found in the Caspian Sea, and the Towers of Silence).  However, MonkeyD didn't give the book a chance. 

 

On Amazon.com we listened to (and MonkeyD danced to) some music clips from a CD that I had tried to get at the library but was unfortunately not available, Rough Guide to Music of Iran.

 

We didn't make a craft this week, but I did find this website, http://www.ehow.com/list_6712810_persian-crafts-kids.html,  with some suggestions of crafts.   This website, http://www.atozkidsstuff.com/iran.html, is a list of helpful links for learning about Iran too.