To that end, I take my kids on a pretend trip around the world every summer, using nothing but materials from the library and ideas from the Internet to learn everything we can about the culture, geography, and history of a new country every week.
This week we hung up our gigantic wall map and all the homemade flags I've saved from our previous years of The Educational Summer Vacation, and I feel the excitement rising already.
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| Everyone asks me about the circles. They're a decorative plates thing I bought at TJ Maxx that is on the wall year-round and has nothing to do with this project. |
Decorated Islamic prayer rugs in Oman:
And didn't die from pickling our own kimchi in North Korea:
We've made scrolls and done maple leaf rubbings.
We've failed at erupting a volcano, failed at growing crystals, and failed at constructing a Roman aqueduct.
We've had a lot of fun.
Of course we've watched our share of boring videos and forgotten some of the things we learned, but it's a great experience and a good use of our time. My oldest, who makes it to the schoolwide geography bee every year and studies other languages on Duolingo for fun, tells me her love of geography started with The Educational Summer Vacation.
If you homeschool, like to torture your children with extra-curricular learning, or are just interested in following along with our family's madcap adventures, then you're in luck, because every Saturday night I'm going to be posting a recap of our "travels."
I made a schedule of the 5 weeks we have free this summer and asked the kids to pick countries from the map. (They thought they were just hilarious for choosing "Turkey" and "Hungary" together.)
July 9 - 14: Sudan
July 16 - 21: Namibia
July 30 - August 4: Turkey
August 6 - 11: Hungary
August 13-16: Turkmenistan
See you next Saturday with the weekly recap!
3 comments:
Love this! Check out Give Your Child the World. It’s a book with tons of book recommendations by region and by age. Check the kidle version. It was recently on sale!
And as for the plates. Tape numbers and hands to them and make them time zone clocks!
I remember when you guys did this last summer! I'm so excited to see what kinds of thrilling things you'll be doing. As for ideas, I have to confess that the first thing I thought of was this Turkish miniseries called "kurt seyit ve sura." I've never seen it (apparently it's a soap opera? And I'm just not willing to give 40+ hours of my life to that kind of thing right now) but there are some people I know of who are obsessed with it :P On a more doable note, y'all should definitely consider making some Turkish Delight! My little brother once had a layover in Turkey and brought us Turkish Delight, and we felt very Narnian ;) Doner kebab is really good, too-when I spend a college semester in Europe, lots of cities had kebab shops, even though we weren't anywhere near Turkey.
I have to confess, I've never heard of Turkmenistan before, so I'm really excited to learn more about it when y'all explore that country!
You're so smart. Those are both great suggestions, thanks!
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