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Posts Tagged ‘geography’

Japanese Activities for Children

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

In this fun hands-on video, I show some Japanese activities for children. The activities include the following:

wearing kimonos
eating Japanese food
playing with Japanese toys
brush painting calligraphy
tasting green tea at a tea ceremony
folding origami, including a windmill and a frog
playing with an abacus
fishing with a net
flying Japanese kites

You will see my children participating in each of these activities in the video. My family attended a Japanese Day at a local community college, and the college students (exchange students from Japan) had booths with the different Japanese activities for children. Each table was set up and ready for the children to mill around and enjoy the different displays. We listened to some Japanese music, too. After spending about an hour on these engaging Japanese activities, our family went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant. My children were able to sample more Japanese foods.

This would be a fun co-op activity to do with other homeschooling families. You could choose a different country once a month and set up hands-on activities at each table in a church gym, so that the children can experience different aspects of each culture. What a great way to learn geography!

Tags: activities, children, geography, Homeschooling, Japan, kimonos, origami
Posted in Homeschooling: Geography | 2 Comments »

Japanese Grill

Friday, January 28th, 2011

Tags: cooking, food, geography, Japan, restaurant
Posted in Cooking and Baking | 2 Comments »

Map of Greece

Monday, January 10th, 2011

Last time we studied Ancient Greece, we made a three-dimensional model of Greece. I bought some white air-hardening clay, and the children helped me to mold it into the shape of Greece. We made dots for all the islands, and a worm-like blob for Crete. We let it harden for two days in a square pyrex dish. Then we poured water into the dish, lower than the level of the clay. We tinted the water blue. It looked stunning!

If you don’t have th e clay to do this easy activity, just go ahead and color a simple map of Greece. Your children can still learn quite a lot just by coloring the shape of the country. If you have some Greek music, you can play that in the background while they are coloring, so they associate the country with the music.

I found a really great website where you can explore ancient Greece. The British Museum website has sections on the Acropolis, Athens, geography, the gods and goddesses of Greece, and many other topics.

Tags: Ancient Greece, geography, Greece, history
Posted in Homeschooling: Geography | 1 Comment »

Egypt Cookies

Monday, September 13th, 2010

My kids decorated cookies to represent the country of Egypt. First I mixed up a batch of sugar cookies and put them in the fridge. The next day, I took half the dough and rolled it out. I cut out four rectangles using a knife. With a spatula, I tried to transfer the dough rectangles onto the cookie sheet. I said “tried” because a couple of them fell apart. (I’m not good at making pie crust either.) I smooshed them back together on the greased cookie sheet, with no one noticing. I baked them. They cooled.

Then I called the children over. They cheered and jumped up and down with glee. “Are we having this for lunch?” they asked.

I didn’t answer. I told them to sit down. I handed each kid a butter knife, and I put the white icing in the middle of the table. The kids covered their cookies with icing as the base or “glue” that would hold everything else in place.

When no one needed whi te any more, I dyed the rest of the icing green. The children used their knives to make an upside-down triangle on the top of their cookie, representing the fertile Nile Delta. They made a fat line going down the rest of the cookie, about the thickness of the butter knife.

Normally to make sand on a cake, I crumble up generic graham crackers from Walmart, the ones that cost $1. But I was in Rosaurs, and their cheapest graham crackers were $4. So I bought generic lemon cookies. We scraped off the stuff in the middle of the cookie and put the bare cookies into a ziplock bag. We pounded the cookies to smithereens. (One of my sons used the wrong end of the mallet and punched lots of tiny holes in the bag, so watch which end you’re using. A hammer would work just as well. Use a nice, thick bag, not a cheap one.)

I snipped off th e blue tube of icing – it’s called “writing gel”– and you can find it at your grocery store near the icing. Otherwise there’s no way for you to make the thin line that the Nile River needs to be. The kids sq ueezed it like a tube of toothpaste down their cookie.

We added three chocolate chips for the three great pyramids. And voila! Edible Egypt! I fed my children vegetables, fruit, and protein before they ate the enormous cookie. What a delicious history class! The kids ate their homework, and no one got in trouble.