The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying the Netherlands (Holland)

Every summer my kids and I pretend to travel the globe, "visiting" one country per week. We learn about geography, history, other cultures and religions, foreign languages, and it puts just enough structure in our day to avoid driving each other crazy.

For the last week of our educational summer vacation this year, the kids and I learned about the Netherlands. Follow along with me: I'll lay it all out if you want to try doing this at home, and if you don't you can at least laugh at our crazy Pinterest fails in the pursuit of knowledge.

(My affiliate links are in this post. Translation: if you buy anything using these links I get a cut at no extra cost to you. Everybody wins.)

Monday

We started by listening to some Dutch music while the kids found the Netherlands on our wall map and filled out their passports.

You can download the passport pages here, cut them into quarters, and staple for a quick and easy passport.

The country's official name is "the Netherlands" (this naturally led the kids to an in-depth discussion on the Nether in Minecraft, and frankly it took me a while to reel them back in,) but it's often called "Holland." Actually, the country brands itself as Holland for tourism purposes, probably because it sounds friendlier. And the people and the language are called Dutch.

The kids did a Google image search for the flag of the Netherlands and copied it for our overbearing Wall 'O Flags.

We read Look What Came From the Netherlands by Kevin Davis. I asked my 11-year-old to take a picture and got totally photobombed by my preschooler.

I think she was just really excited about the Netherland's contributions to the world and couldn't contain her enthusiasm.

The book had some Dutch words and their pronunciations in the back, so we learned "please" (ahl-stew-BLEEFT) and "thank you" (DAHNK-uh) to use at mealtimes all week. We also practiced counting 1 to 10 with this video.

I've mentioned before that I love the Countries Around the World series from Schlessinger Media. The one on the Netherlands wasn't available on Amazon, but I did find it at my library (go, interlibrary loan!) They're 13 minutes long with a kid for a narrator so it's just right for our purposes.

That night Phillip told the kids about when he served a mission for our church. Six months of it was spent in Aruba, which used to belong to the Netherlands. He spoke Papiamento there, which is a mix of English, Spanish, and Dutch. The kids speak Dutch in school, Papiamento at home, and English on the street with their friends. The capital is Oranjestaad, or "orange city," because the color of the Dutch royal family is orange.

Tuesday

The Netherlands is a low-lying country, mostly at or below sea level, so the Dutch are masters of flood prevention. They built canals and dikes, but also used windmills to power pumps for the water.  

We read Katje the Windmill Cat by Gretchen Woelfle, based on a famous flood where a cat and baby survived. My 3-year-old was riveted the entire time, and that's saying something because she never stops moving (for proof, see photobomb above.)

I didn't know if my kids, especially the younger ones, really got how you could power something with a windmill, so we watched this video on how the wind turns the blades to move the gears:



To let the kids experiment with this principle, I got out one of my favorite toys from my childhood, Gearopolis. It looks like they no longer make this toy, but you can still find it from private sellers! (I got mine at a consignment store a few years ago.)

After they'd gotten their fill of Gearopolis (I could tell because they gradually devolved into throwing toys and telling potty jokes,) we watched a few more videos explaining the water pumping aspect of windmills.

Most used an Archimedes screw like the one in this video to move water, and then we got a little cocky and tried (read: utterly failed at) making an Archimedes screw. We attempted to follow this tutorial, but it was a disaster. The kids were bored and just wanted to go play Gearopolis, the tape was not holding things together, and I remembered why I hate doing crafts with the fire of a thousand suns. Seriously, we are not a crafting family.

Works just about as well as it looks like it does.
(P.S: Why are there always random plates in the background of all our pictures?)

Trying to work the screw to pump "water" (a.k.a. Cheerios). At least the kids enjoyed the snack.

Wednesday

Everybody knows Holland is famous for tulips, but did you know there was a huge tulip-buying frenzy in the 1600s? Seriously, at one point a tulip bulb was going for several times the average person's yearly salary.

We read Hana in the Time of the Tulips by Deborah Noyes to introduce the whole crazy thing. You could use it as a jumping -off point to talk more about economics and bubbles if you wanted to.

Then we looked at Google images of tulip bulbs and how everything come from inside, and how a bulb is different than a seed. The kids especially liked this tulip time lapse video:

Afterwards we made "fork tulips," using this tutorial from Kids Play Box. I thought it might be too babyish of an activity for my older kids but they all enjoyed it equally.

Even though they were sharing paint so they had similar color schemes, each of them had their own idea and style.

While we painted, I put on Holland's Tulip Gardens from the Gardens of the World series. The kids (or me, for that matter) would probably never sit still to just watch the video since it was just music and shots of flowers, but it was perfect for background to this activity.

While they worked on their fork tulips, I was in and out of the room making oliebollen (literally "oil balls",) or Dutch donuts. Think of donut holes, with apple slices and raisins.

I'd never deep fried anything before and was slightly worried about splashing oil burning off my face, but it was fine.

So how were they?

Honestly, we threw most of them away because raisins in a donut is not, apparently, a taste we like. We're just too American.

Thursday

Today was less focused, and more of a random smattering of all things Dutch.

After reading Festivals of the World: Netherlands by Joyce Van Fenema (my son was really interested in learning all about Sinterklaas, the origin of Santa,) we turned to YouTube.

We watched this short music video showing some traditional Dutch fashions and then this 5-minute documentary on how wooden shoes (called klompen) are made.

We watched a 30-minute video called Amsterdam from Vista Point, and then talked about two famous Dutch painters, Rembrandt and Van Gogh. 

The plan was to have each of them choose a painting and have them recreate it. Rembrant's style was a little, ahem, intimidating for the kids:

Not pictured: Rambrandt's painting of a human autopsy in progress.
(Really, it's called "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp." Look it up.)

But Van Gogh seemed a little more accessible, so they all chose one of his works, instead.

Slightly more kid-friendly, no?

I was refilling the printer cartridge to print out a line drawing of "Starry Night" for my 3-year-old when a massive ink explosion derailed the rest of our evening, so the kids had to finish theirs the next day.

(The older kids just copied the original by looking at an image online, but I did print out a line drawing for my preschooler. To find a line drawing of a famous work online for little kids to color, search for it on Google images, then click Search Tools > Type > Line Drawing.)

Friday

You can't really talk about the Netherlands without talking about Anne Frank, so today was her day.

She was born in Germany but her family left for the Netherlands when things started getting dicey. Unfortunately the Germans occupied Holland during WWII and her family still had to go into hiding.

I learned so much by watching The Short Life of Anne Frank from Schlessinger Media. The 30-minute documentary was designed for later elementary school-aged kids, so it was totally age-appropriate, both in how it explained events and how it kept their attention. It told my kids what happened without giving them nightmares.

We already had a copy of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, but if you don't I highly recommend that you get one.

This is my copy from when I was a kid. I think it still has all the pages, even!

For dinner we made Bami Goreng, an Indonesian stiry-fry that's become a Dutch staple. Apparently there's a lot of Indonesian influence in the food from the spice trade and Dutch colonization of Indonesia... who knew??

As a bedtime story we read a picture book to the Dutch nursery rhyme Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. This poem has been done a few different times, but the version we used was  Wynken, Blynken, & Nod by Eugene Field.

Saturday

Gouda cheese was first made in the Netherlands, so we had a little cheese tasting party after dinner.

I'm usually not a fan of fancy cheeses. I don't know about you, but it makes me feel like a sucker when I drop a bunch of money on something that smells disgusting and tastes worse. But I actually liked gouda cheese. It smelled and tasted good!

(We wanted to try Edam cheese, another famous Dutch cheese, but I didn't see any at my regular grocery store. As I mentioned, I'm not too psyched about hunting down specialty cheeses, so I didn't try very hard to find it anywhere else.)

Before bed we read Donald and the Big Cheese: An Adventure in the Netherlands from Disney's Small World Library, and it was a fun recap for the kids about all we'd learned.


We didn't get to do everything we'd wanted this week. I kept meaning to make pannekoeken, a kind of Dutch pancake, for a lunch/dessert kind of thing, but I'll have to save the recipe for later.

Also, I'm pretty sure we own a cute, funny movie called The Best Two Years about some missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in the Netherlands. As a Latter-day Saint, I've always liked it, but I'd be interested to watch it again now that we've learned all about the country. I'd probably notice things in the movie that escaped me before. I'll have to dig it out of the basement!

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7 Quick Takes about How to Get Ahead When You're Really Disorganized, A Meal I'll Never Forget, and Why I Have Tendonitis Now

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday!

—1—

Remember that awesome camping trip with our friends I told you about last week, and how we went to a beach on the ocean where everyone gets eaten by sharks?

Well, I learned that the day after we went there, it was closed due to blood in the water. I'm thinking/hoping it was from a seal or something.

I'm beginning to notice that this other family and I leave carnage in our wake every time we go camping together. A few years ago the very river we canoed down had a massive bridge collapse two weeks later.

Moral of the story: if I ever mention that I'm going camping near your house, check out the coverage on your homeowner's insurance. You're probably going to need it.

—2—

You'd think that with less than a week until school starts, my big project would be back-to-school shopping. But no, that's not how I work. I'm actually working on getting organized for camping.

This might sound counter-intuitive, but hear me out: I cannot think ahead of time. I've tried, and I've failed. So I do the next best thing, which is to do it after the fact, and then be way ahead of the game for next year.

(Phillip thought I was insane when I made a Christmas card holder this January, but if I didn't do it right then when it was still on my mind, it'd never get done.)

I've seen the OCD camping packing lists and the anal-retentive bin system and thought, "What normal person does that?" 

Well, I am. Because I'm tired of being a stressed-out mess when packing for a camping trip. Instead of collecting individual band-aids and paper plates and flashlights from random locations in my house, I'm just buying duplicates of everything we take camping, putting it all in a labeled bin, and reveling in the knowledge that I've just shaved hours off of our packing time for the rest of our lives.

Maybe it's dumb to do that after the season is over, but that's just how I roll.

(Except for the stupid stepping stones I started in June 2014. I probably won't finish those ever.)

My grandchildren will be hauling these out of my basement after I die.

—3—

When Phillip grocery shops, you're never quite sure what he's going to bring home. When he sees something interesting, he can't help himself from wondering about the possibilities of using it in the kitchen. (Since "interesting" usually means "expensive," I try to do most of the grocery shopping around here.)

This week Phillip saw some veal liver for a dollar a pound (manager's special!) and you know what happened next. He started thinking about all the health benefits of liver and how we've never had it, and the next thing you know it just jumped into the cart with the rest of our food.

Feast your eyes on the baby cow liver before you. LOOK AT IT!!!

When the kids asked what kind of meat this was, Phillip chose his words very carefully. "Cow," he told them circumspectly.

And then we bit into it.

For those of you who've never had liver before, allow me to describe it to you: imagine a food-like substance with the texture of Spam. At first bite, it tastes like grass mixed with the juice left in a can of peas. And then, just as you're about to swallow: BAM!! Aftertaste of sweaty socks.

"Aggggh! What part of the cow is this?" the kids screamed as they clawed at their throats and pushed each other down running to the kitchen for water.

"Is it the poop??" my 3-year-old asked, wide-eyed.

After all is said and done, though, I wouldn't take back the experience. I've never had food that made me laugh and dry heave at the same time before.

—4—

On the spur of the moment, we decided to celebrate the end of summer with a S'more bonfire in the backyard. But silly me, I forgot that we have children and so it took us about the same length of time to get outside as it would for us to pack up and move to France.

As you can see, our youngest (foreground, with Leap Frog computer) isn't much of an outdoorsman.

This is what happens when you ask a 3-year-old to roast you a marshmallow.

—5—

We've also been grappling with a weird on-and-off stomach bug in our house, which has made us feel a little out of sorts this week.

I'll tell you what's life-changing, though. A kid old enough to:

(a) detect ahead of time when he's going to vomit
(b) make it to the bathroom in time
(c) flush the toilet on his own afterward.

Let me tell you guys, it's WAY better than when a toddler cries out "Mommy? I don't feel good!" and when you get there she pukes down the front of your shirt.

—6—

I'm already having pangs of wistfulness for summer. A flurry of start-of-the-school year emails forced me to pull out the calendar and fill it up with all my kids' soccer games and practices and school-related activities... and I don't think I'm ready. 
In less than a week's time I'm going to be waking up every day when it's still dark out.

—7—

The biggest disaster of the week this week wasn't caused by my children, but my me, and I think that's noteworthy. There are 5 of them, after all, and causing epic disasters is both their full-time job and their favorite way to spend their free time.

I must not have attached the syringe right when I refilled our printer ink, because it flew off the bottle and ink exploded everywhere. All over me, my 3-year-old, and most disastrously, my sheer white curtains.

Not just any curtains, mind you. Our window is a funny size so I personally designed and made all 4 panels, even though I hate sewing, even though I wouldn't wish working with sheer fabric on my worst enemy, and it took me about 50 hours to finish.

Before the Exxon Valdez oil spill, obviously.

After staring at what I'd done with my mouth hanging open for 5 minutes, I leaped into action, hoping I could just bleach out the spots. But bleach did absolutely nothing. Nothing!

You know what worked? Hair spray. I told the kids to have crackers for dinner, spread everything out on the kitchen floor, and individually spritzed every single ink spot with hairspray and rubbed it out with a toothbrush.

Because of the way the fabric was woven, the ink made these little plus signs all over.

Get ready for the magic to happen.

The ink just transferred to the paper towel below, like an iron-on patch!

It took me two hours including a trip to CVS for the biggest honking bottle of Aqua-Net I've ever seen, and then a final rub-down with Fels-Naptha (my favoritest stain remover in the world,) but the curtains actually look like nothing ever happened.

Which is good, because I am NOT sewing new ones.



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The Strange But True Guide to Mormons

*Note: Mormons actually prefer to be called 'members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,' or just 'Latter-day Saints' for short, but for SEO purposes I'll let "Mormon" stand in the title.

A few months ago I wrote a post called What in the World Is a Mormon?, outlining the 6 beliefs that influence me most in my day-to-day life as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And do you know what? They're really pretty similar (most of them, anyway) to my Catholic and Protestant friends down the street. After all, we both have our most basic, fundamental belief in common: that Jesus Christ is our savior. Everything else I believe as a Latter-day Saint is just an extension of that, icing on the cake.

Without downplaying the importance of the cake, though, I'd like to talk a little bit more in-depth about the icing. What are the other beliefs that make Latter-day Saints different?

We Don't Believe in the Trinity

Oh, we believe in God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, all right. We just don't think they're the same being.

We think they're three separate people who work in complete unison with each other. We call this the Godhead, which makes the most sense to me in light of Jesus' prayer in John 17: 21:

"That they [Christ's followers] all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us..."

We Believe in Prophets

Not just prophets that wore robes and lived a long time ago, either. Just like Noah and Moses in the Bible, we think God has a mouthpiece on the earth today, and he heads our church.

Is it a pretty big leap of faith to believe that there are prophets today? You bet, but I believe it 100%.

Whenever I read the epistles of Peter and Paul to the first Christians in the New Testament, I'm reminded again how lucky I am to have a modern-day version of Peter right now, addressing the world that I live in.

We Believe in a Restoration

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that God has always done business by calling prophets, but there was a long pause, lasting from the time Jesus' apostles died until a person named Joseph Smith became a prophet in the early 1800s.

In the interim we think some things, some really important things, were lost from Christ's teachings. Joseph Smith's job was to bring those lost things back.

Most of our church's "differences" are, according to us, truths that were lost during that period of almost 2,000 years — and then restored, through prophets again.

We Believe in the Priesthood

Priesthood is God's authorization to perform religious rites like baptism, and we think it was one of those "lost things" I mentioned a minute ago.

The priesthood was brought back through the angels of Peter, James, and John. They came and ordained Joseph Smith to the same priesthood Jesus gave them when they were alive.

Whoever has the priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today, it's come down the line all the way from Jesus Christ.

And it's not very exclusive, either: all Latter-day Saint men who meet basic standards of faithfulness qualify to hold the priesthood. They don't need to go to divinity school or get a theological degree (fun fact: to Latter-day Saints, "seminary" is what we call the weekday scripture-study class for teenagers!)

We Believe in Additional Scriptures

Latter-day Saints believe in the Bible, the record of ancient Jews and their dealings with God. We also believe in the Book of Mormon, which is a record of ancient Americans and their interactions with God. We've also canonized written revelations from our prophets documenting God's dealings with us!

In short, we just don't believe that God is done talking to us.

Could other important revelations, or even other books of scripture, be revealed at some future point through the prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Sure. That's what he's there for.

We Don't Believe in Original Sin

If you ever get invited to a Latter-day Saint's baptism, you'll probably notice that the person getting baptized looks a little... old.

Since we don't believe in any sin passing down to us from Adam and Eve, we think babies are born pure and perfect. They're not even capable of sinning until they get old enough to understand right from wrong.

Latter-day Saint scripture sets the "age of accountability" at 8, which is the minimum age for baptism in our church.

We Believe in Temples

Latter-day Saint temples are really cool to look at, but that's not really why we build them. Inside we do important work. Adults go there to make further promises of faithfulness to God, and can also be "sealed" to their families.

Sealing means you're bound together in a family unit forever, even after you die. Not only are you sealed to your spouse in the temple, but you're also sealed to your parents and your children.

We Believe in Ordinances for the Dead

I can't conceive of a fair and loving God who'd punish anyone for lack of opportunity, so I think it makes beautifully perfect sense that we offer people who've passed away the same chance we've had to get baptized, confirmed, and sealed to our families.

We believe that people's spirits continue after death, and that they're free to accept or reject any baptism or sealing we do on their behalf. It doesn't make them an automatic member of our church, it just gives them the option to say "YES!!!" or  "Ew, no thank you."

We Believe All People Are Children of God

When we say God is our Father, we're being literal. We don't mean He adopted us like you'd take in a stray cat or made us like a carpenter makes a chest of drawers. We mean He's the father of our spirits. We're the same species, and our full potential is to grow up to be like Him.

The result is, I personally do a lot of extrapolating about my parent-child relationship with my own kids to better understand my relationship with my Heavenly Father. I also see Him as more personal and loving than I did before I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We Believe in an Expansive Heaven

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that there are actually three different kingdoms of heaven (see 1 Corinthians 15: 41,) and that most people will end up in one of them.

Exactly where we go after we die depends on the degree to which we had faith Christ and followed Him. But even disobedient and "bad" people, as long as they aren't Latter-day Saints who've committed the unpardonable sin of "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 12: 31) will end up in one of the kingdoms of heaven.

Being fair and all-knowing, I think our Heavenly Father takes all factors into account when weighing a life.

If you have something to say, please go ahead and leave a comment below, send me a message on Facebook, or email me. 

Just remember what your mama said: play nice.

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No Educational Summer Update This Week, But How About a Funny Video Instead?

If you've been enjoying our educational summer vacation series updates on Saturday nights, I'm so glad!

But between unpacking from our D.C. trip and repacking (and unpacking again) for our camping trip, we took a week's break from pretending to travel the world. I prefer to think of it as "a conscious uncoupling."

I'll be back with our FINAL update of the summer next Saturday, so until then, enjoy one of my favorite things that exists on YouTube. And I mean it.



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7 Quick Takes about Retro Cooking, How Not to Disguise Stuff as Trees, and a Camping Trip (with Surprise Ending!)

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday!

—1—

It's so good to be home... again. Last Saturday night we got home from Washington, D.C., and then on Tuesday morning we shipped out to go camping.

If you can help it, I don't recommend scheduling back-to-back trips like this.

The stress might get to you and you'll find yourself up at 2:30 AM the morning before you leave watching dumb videos on YouTube and eating an entire bag of chocolate chips instead of packing.

—2—

In the spirit of last-minute camping prep, we waited until the day before we left to buy a camp stove. (In the past we've always bummed one off of our friends, but we figure since we're all old and mature now we should just buy one.)

Phillip found this $13 beauty on Craigslist:

That's not rust, it's character.

50 years old, still works! (Not Phillip, the stove.)

Phillip's laughing in this picture because everyone kept giving him grief about how ancient the stove was.

Our friends wanted to know if it was legal to use without wearing Larry Byrd basketball shorts and a pair of muttonchops. Also whether we'd tried to clean off the 1970s pancakes burned onto the bottom.

—3—

Some funny observations from the road:

First, this truck advertising a certain brand of paint that shall not be named...

'Cover the Earth' with dripping blood-red paint? What kind of logo is that?

I wouldn't describe myself as an environmentalist but this ad actually made me feel guilty about having painted our house.

Maybe I could email the company with a new logo. I was thinking about this one:

What do you think?

—4—

I also saw, for the first time, a cell tower disguised to look like a tree.

I tried to get a picture but I'm too slow on the uptake. But I found a similar one on Flickr Creative Commons so you at least can visualize what it looked like:

"I'm a tree, guys! Shut up, I am."
photo courtesy of Kevin Stephenson

It was the most bizarre-looking thing you've ever seen. It was twice as tall as all the real trees around it, and it only had "leaves" on the top 15 feet of it.

I'm laughing about it as I type, just thinking about it.

—5—

This was our 5th annual campout with some friends of ours. We've been doing this since we both had three kids who were 2, 4, and 6!

Phillip and I have since added two more kids and we've never missed a campout, even if I was 7 months pregnant (did it!) or had a 6-month-old baby (also did it!)

Our families get along great but we always joke that we aren't allowed to talk to each other outside of our annual camping trip — which would be funny if it weren't practically true. Life just gets busy, and I apparently need to work on being a better friend.

When I say "It's not you, it's me," trust me: It's me.

—6—

If you haven't gone camping with friends before, it's awesome. You've got to do it. Your kids play together, you get to have some grown-up conversation, and if you forget something it's not a huge deal because maybe the other family brought it!

Pretty sure my friend's husband is actually the Pied Piper.

We were camping near the ocean so we visited a ranger-led talk on an ocean beach about sharks and seals. Here was the warning sign at the beach entrance:

Yeah, it's a lot to read. Let me sum up: You're all going to die.

No sharks were sighted, but there were hundreds of seals really close to the beach. It didn't show up well on film, but there was a little island about 50 yards out that was packed with seals, and they kept swimming toward the beach.

Not sure how helpful the binoculars are since I don't think she knows what a seal is.

Every now and then a seal would surface 20 yards out, not far away from the swimmers. It was the coolest.

The next day we went kayaking and generally had a great time.

—7—

And for a perfect ending to the perfect trip, we got home to find that the toilet had been running for 3 days straight.

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