Kenya Days 4 & 5

Day 4: Kenyan Children

Melodie red these children books

and then watched these videos

Children of Kenya

Maasai Life Through A Child's Eyes

Melodie loved the videos. She said it was interesting to learn about children who live somewhere else. She was mesmerized by the short hair. 

She also looked at a day in the life on a Kenyan child at Time for Kids. 

Then we tried Kenyan food. We went to a little hole in the wall called Kenyan Cafe. We started with samosa and mandazi (Mel didn't care for either, Aria loved the outside of the samosas). For dinner, Rocky had githeri and Melodie and I shared kuku kienyeji with mboja. The descriptions made it easy to order, as did the dictionary on the back of the menu.

Melodie liked the chicken and chapati (which Aria kept calling a tortilla) but did not care for the cabbage. Aria chowed down on wali, but Melodie thought it was too plain.

The more the merrier! We had friends join us (their favorite Ethiopian place is right next door)

Day 5

A make it simple kind of day. Melodie finished up her passport using these websites

Our Africa

3D Geography

Time for Kids

Science Kids

National Geographic Kids

Then we had some fun watching different kinds of African dances

Kamba

Isukuti

Giriama

Chakacha

Nyatiti

Masai

And, of course, we had to try African dancing ourselves!

Five(ish) Minute African Dance Lesson

Next week we were suppose to stay in Africa and head to Egypt, but we're going to jump over to Asia for a few weeks. Don't worry...we'll head back!

Kenya Day 3

Swahili and Movie Day

Another friend today! Together they read 

The introduction was full of so much information. There are so many African languages, but Swahili is common in much of East Africa. We focused on the numbers to go along with the book. After the book, they watched Work the World Swahili Lesson: Numbers to make sure they were pronouncing them correctly. They were pretty proud of themselves for getting most of them correct (the book had pronunciation guides). Then they worked on their cursive with a worksheet I made

They did giggle a bit at tatu (three) because it's pronounced ta too. I don't know why this was so funny to them, but it was. 

And then we watched The Lion King. The girls worked on their movie madness worksheets and thought it was fun to learn the meanings of the characters names. After the movie they wanted to watch some of the bonus features about Africa. 

After her friend left, Melodie did this worksheet from Disney Family

PS I forgot to post the movie madness for Up, so here it is:

Kenya Day 2

Savanna Safari

We had another friend spend time with us today, which made all the activities for today even more fun!

We started off with a little reading

and then watched an Animal Atlas episode . 

Art with Mr. Giannetto has some great art projects. When I saw the Giraffe Silhouettes in the African Savanna, I knew I had found the perfect craft. There are so many crafts out there with African animals, but this one seemed a little more artsy and less crafty, if that makes any sense. 

The girls did them a little differently than the instructions on the Art with Mr. Giannetto blog. Instead of drawing and then painting the giraffe, they drew it onto black paper. They used this book to help draw the giraffe:

I love, love, love the way their art turned out.

Then they went on a safari...a math safari! Armed with my camera and this worksheet I made 

the girls took off looking for items (with Aria tagging along). Here are some of my favorites:

Another math activity that was a hit! 

After her friend went home, Melodie learned about the African Savannah food web using exploringnature.org.

(I got the idea for a math scavenger hunt at teacherspayteachers.com, but I wanted something consolidated to only one page and wanted it to be a photo hunt)

Kenya Day 1

Kenya!! Leaving South America and on to Africa. 

I attempted a field trip today, but the place I wanted to go to wasn't open. Store hours weren't on the website or the phone message, but I thought we'd give it a try any way. Closed on Mondays! Not to make the drive worthless (and because we had a friend with us), we walked by the ocean and got ice cream. 

But first, fun cutout pirate pictures. Except the random Elsa one. Aria just loves Elsa...so much so that it was difficult to get a picture of her looking away from the cutout and at the camera.

  

Sarah Pan!!! I love it!!

I'm not sure why they ate ice cream on a cone with a spoon, but because they did, the little one just had to as well. 

Now back to Kenya. We started off the usual way...changing the board, time zones, and a few things in the passport (including her entrance stamp). 

Then we worked on the mapping worksheet from HomeschoolCreations.net (I previously used the Argentina and Venezuela ones) and found out Melodie didn't know about the equator. So, we took a little detour.

While learning about the last two countries we talked briefly about biomes, but now it was time to dive in a little more. SwitchZoo.com has a Build a Biome activity that I thought Melodie would find interesting. We worked on the grassland biome (for Kenya) together. I thought that would be it and we'd move on, but Melodie liked it so much she wanted to do the other biomes by herself. Learning accomplished! 

Then I realized, because of the holiday weekend, I didn't get the library books for Kenya. So we spent the rest of the afternoon at the library. Not too much about Kenya, but it's just the beginning of the week! 

Venezuela Day 5

Movie Day!!

I love Up. Have you seen those memes that show moments from Up and say, "the greatest love story can be told in minutes and without any words"? Something like that anyway. I always cry. Always.

Anyway, we started our movie day by going over the landscapes of Venezuela that are on the currency. I made this worksheet:

where Melodie matched the landscape currency with the name and an actual picture. 

Lunch time! I only found one Venezuelan restaurant (and it was still 20+min. away), but we had to go. Mil Jugos was a cute little place. We were excited to try a new kind of food.

We started off with a jugo to drink (there were so many kinds, but Melodie REALLY wanted pineapple). We ordered a pollo arepa and a queso cachapa to share. I could have eaten so much more of the pollo filling it was so good. Melodie tried both, but liked the arepa. I don't think the queso was quite what she was expecting. Aria loved the cachapa.

They dug in and enjoyed. So much so that we ordered quesillo for dessert. It was a lot like flan, and I don't care for flan, so the girls ate it. 

At home, Mel read an article where the director and story supervisor of Up talk about the landscape inspiration. This lead to talking about waterfalls. I was going to go over this web page on Fun Waterfall Facts for Kids, but it seems like Mel knew a lot of it already. I didn't even know she learned about waterfalls. She said it was for state testing. Hmmmm....Anyway, she was full of information. But she had forgotten that Angel Falls (the tallest waterfall in the world) was in Venezuela (she did remember that on warm days the water turns to mist before it reaches the pool). I got the idea to make a mini waterfall from education.com, but she glued things and I wanted to put back whatever we found. 

Melodie took her job of building very seriously. She made a few before she was happy with the results, and some she had to rebuild when a certain toddler thought she was being helpful. 

We ended up with a beautiful waterfall.

And then we watched the movie Up (and yes, I cried during the whole Carl and Ellie sequence).

Venezuela Days 3 & 4

Day 3 

Today we finished up animals. Melodie researched and read about the Red Siskin and the Harpy Eagle online (on the 10 and 100 Bolivares). Then she read about the Armadillo (on the 5 Bolivares) and wrote her own myth. Next, she read this online book about the Hawksbill Turtle (on the 20). She loved the joke on the cover and told it to several people today. 

I found the cutest penguin multiplication game that I had intended to use for Argentina. But, I took off the penguins, but on Hawksbill Turtles, and now it was perfect for Venezuela! I thought we'd play a couple of times, but Mel loved this game so much we played it over, and over, and over...

An incredibly happy Mel (first time she won)

The only animal we didn't get to was the Amazon River Dolphin. We were going to make a paper craft model, but so many other fun things came up this week. We did cut out all the parts, so maybe we'll put it together on Sunday. 

Day 4

We only had time to quickly go over the people on the currency and do a few things in her passport. For the people on the currency, I made this worksheet:

It was to help see where the people on the currency fit in to Venezuela's history. 

Day 5 promises to be a fun one!

Venezuela Days 1 & 2

Day 1: Field Trip Day! We went to our small local zoo. I made a little booklet where we kept track of of any animals we saw that were from countries we are learning about.

The first animal we saw from a country we are learning about

Aria enjoyed "taking pictures" (the camera doesn't work)

Melodie was thrilled when she recognized something she had learned the previous week

Day 2 we started Venezuela. What we are learning is coming from the currency. Each Bolivar has an image of an important person, wildlife in danger of extinction, and landscapes. We started with animals.  The 50 has a spectacled bear, and I found an article titled "Meet the Real Life Bear Who Inspired the Amazing 'Paddington' Story". I made an author's perspective worksheet

and planned on having Mel read the book and do the worksheet (even though he's from Peru, he's still a spectacled bear). But then, a few days ago, I found out that a movie theater was showing Paddington as part of their summer movie series ($1 tickets). Perfect! So, off the movies we went! That didn't leave much time for the rest of the animals, so we'll learn about them tomorrow.