The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Somalia

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Every year, my kids choose a bunch of countries and we devote our summer vacation to learning all about them: the history, the food, the language, the religion, the culture... everything and anything. 

This week is the last week of what I like to call The Educational Summer Vacation (mostly because it annoys my kids and makes us sound like a super-smart family,) and the kids wanted to spend it in Somalia.

I checked out Somalia from the Enchantment of the World series and Africa from the Eyewitness book series, and got a few novels for the 16-year-old and I to read, including City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence and Call Me American by Adbi Nor Iftin.

Monday

We started by finding Somalia on the big wall map, which my 6-year-old pointed out was super-easy because Somalia is shaped like a 7.

There it is, right on the horn of Africa.

They filled their last passport page of the year (free for download here,) although I'll add new pages next year and keep them from year to year so I can look back and see their cute little elementary school handwriting.

While the kids were coloring the Somali flag, we looked up its symbolism and then I read Somalia from the Exploring Countries series out loud.

Light blue for the U.N., 5-pointed star for the 5 clans of Somalia.

Did you know that the song "Wavin' Flag" was written by a Somali rapper about his home country? I didn't, but we read it in the book about Somalia, and since it was one of my favorite songs back in the day when I went to Zumba class, we watched the music video and I gained a new appreciation for it (a version with the lyrics is here.)

We watched Part 1 of this documentary on Somalia, but it was a little too boring for the younger kids so we didn't make it to Part 2.

Instead, we decided to talk about leopards. The leopard is the national animal of Somalia, which you can see on the country's coat of arms.

We watched this 5-minute documentary about leopards and then we talked about how a leopard's "spots" are actually called rosettes. If you look at them closely, they aren't spots at all but a brown dot with smaller black blotches all around it.

The younger kids looked at a picture of a leopard and decorated this paper plate, replicating the rosettes as accurately as they could. My boys wanted to use googly eyes, but my 8-year-old was fully committed to realism and wanted to make her eyes green just like a real leopard.

While they were doing that, the big kids made a map of where leopards live in the world and told us some facts about them.

Green is where leopards live today; red is where they used to live but don't anymore.

(At dinner, my 6-year-old announced to my husband "I painted a cheetah!" so it's clear that we all learned a lot today.)

For dinner we ate bariis, which is literally translated "rice." As you can guess, it's a rice dish.

I had the kids watch the video included in this recipe over dinner because the recipe creator talks about the role of bariis in Somali culture. You even see her eating it with her hands at the end, as is tradition.

Tuesday

Somalia's two official languages are Somali and Arabic. We've already covered two other Arabic-speaking countries this summer, so we decided to focus on learning some Somali words today.

We practiced counting 1 to 10 in Somali with this cute little girl (I'm not sure if the kids remembered the numbers, but they sure do remember the cute inflection in her voice because they've been copying it all day.)

We looked at this helpful list of Somali phrases and learned how to say "please" (fadlan,) "thank you" (mahadsanid,) and "my hovercraft is full of eels" (huufarkarafkayga waxaa ka buuxa eels.)

My daughter looked the last one up and apparently it's a Monty Python thing.

Somali has used a variety of writing systems throughout the years as shown here, but in 1973 the Somali Latin script was made official. That means my kids all recognized the letters, but they were in a different order and some were actually two of our letters grouped together, which blew my 4-year-old's mind.

We watched yet another cute Somali kid teaching us the alphabet, then divided up for the next activity. The older kids went to watch this YouTube video about the written language, while the younger kids made some sequencing towers to put the Somali alphabet in order.

The Somali ABCs... or, BTJs?

I cut out little rectangles of paper and the kids wrote the Somali letters on them (this was mostly a a way to trick my 6-year-old to practice his handwriting, because he hates writing lately,) then  we taped the papers to Duplos and watched the video in slow motion to stack them in the correct order.

My 4-year-old copied what everyone else did, but he was very confused. We watched another video that had the letter next to an object starting with that letter, and when he saw an apple next to the Somali letter T, he looked at me more confused than I've ever seen him and asked, "Tapple??"

I made beef suqaar for dinner, which was basically beef stew with fewer spices. We like beef stew, though, so that part was just fine.

Wednesday

For lunch, I made some Somali flat bread called lahooh. We ate it with butter and honey. My kids were not impressed.

I think because they resembled pancakes, the kids had the wrong expectations. The lahooh really weren't bad. They weren't good, either. I was totally neutral on the lahooh.

After cleaning up, we talked about the history of Somalia. It's kind of amazing that Somalia is even still standing, because for about 25 years, it had no national government. There were no federal institutions: schools, infrastructure, law enforcement. 

People got along by relying on the clan legal structures they'd used before, but without a coast guard, Somalia had no way to defend its own waters. Other countries could dump their waste or illegally fish off their coasts and no one did anything about it.

Enter Somali pirates. The started out just defending their country's coast, but some people realized how lucrative piracy could be and a whole new industry was born. It turns out this is actually pretty complicated:

After putting the younger kids to bed that night, Phillip and I and our teenagers watched the DVD Captain Phillips. Today Somali piracy has declined drastically, but this movie was based on a true story during its height in 2009. Super-intense.

Thursday

Today, we learned about Somalia's fight to rebuild after so many years of civil war. 

This video featured a great vocabulary word for the kids to look up: diaspora. It means people who've been forced to remove from their homeland. 

I asked the kids if they knew what a refugee was. We talked about how people usually need a passport or visa to enter a foreign country but if they're escaping a country that's too dangerous for them to live in right now, they can leave as refugees.

My 8- and 12-year-old summarized When Stars are Scattered, a comic book-style story about Somali kids living in a refugee camp that I'd given them earlier that week. 

I encouraged the teenagers to read two other books I'd picked up about a town in Maine with an influx of Somali refugees: One Goal by Amy Bass and Home Now: How 6,000 Refugees Transformed an American Town by Cynthia Anderson. Haven't read either yet, but they sound fascinating.

For dinner that night we had baasto, which is how you say "pasta" in Somali because their alphabet doesn't include the letter "p."

What are we doing having spaghetti bolognese in Somalia? Well, Somalia used to be divided up into parts that were colonized by France, Britain, and Italy. Thanks to the Italians, Somalis apparently love pasta.

Friday

There are a large number of nomads in Somalia. So many, in fact, it's hard to get an accurate count of how many people live in Somalia because 3 out of 5 of them have no permanent address!

One popular type of nomadic tent in Somalia is the aqal. This video was really informative, and then we watched this one of a Somali college student building an aqal for a school project.

In the second video, the kids noticed the lady at 2:38 waggling her tongue back and forth and asked what she was doing. I explained she was ululating, which is kind of like Africa's version of yelling "Wooo!" when we're excited. 

I showed them this video and then wished I hadn't because they were doing it ALL DAY after that. Please do not tell any of this to your children. You'll be sorry.

It was a little hard to reign them back in after that detour, but as an activity I told them to go out and find some materials in the yard to build a small model of a Western-style tent for camping and a model of a Somali aqal.

They decided that Western-style tents were faster to put up if you're going camping for a weekend, but Somali aqals were sturdier, better at keeping out sand and wind, and fit more people. So probably better for nomads.

Saturday

Most people in Somalia are Sunni Muslim, but there is a sizable subset who are Sufis. Sufi spiritualism is an interpretation of Islam that emphasizes the individual's mystic experience with God. You've probably heard of the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey? That's them. 

But in all the videos I watched of Somali Sufis, I didn't see any spinning. They were all sitting or standing in a line, rhythmically bobbing and swaying as they chanted or sang.

Islam has two major holidays, and they're both called Eid. 

I split the kids up into two groups and gave them a few minutes to research either Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha and report on what it was about and how it was celebrated.

We read the book Crayola Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr Colors and talked about some of the yummy foods they have at this giant Eid feast. We decided to make halwa, which is popular at Eid and also at Somali weddings.

Unfortunately, ours didn't look appetizing at any point during the cooking process and looked even less appetizing when it was finished.

I suspect I look like a witch stirring something bubbling in my cauldron right about now.

I'm supposed to be able to take this out and cut it but it's too... oozy.

I'm not sure what I did wrong, but my halwa didn't solidify. It just congealed into a jelly-like substance that tasted vaguely of gingerbread cookies.

What a way to end the week.

With the exception of the halwa, though, the kids and I had a good time on our trip to Somalia. We tried some new foods, gained appreciation for a new culture, and they learned there are new ear-splitting noises to discover all over this beautiful planet of ours. The Educational Summer Vacation is all about broadening horizons, after all.

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7 Quick Takes about Camping in Paradise, an Unexpected Visitor, and Why There's Nothing Worse than a Bad New England Accent

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

We went camping over the weekend. It was pretty glorious.

Not only was it the first time in 5 months that we've been out of the house for more than a few hours, it was gorgeous there.

This view alone was worth having to crouch over a pit toilet all weekend.

—2—

We also got new (to us) couches! We found a good deal on Facebook Marketplace on two truly massive couches that will fit all 8 of us comfortably for family movie nights in the basement.

It was a lot of driving, because the guy lived half an hour away and we had to make two trips to ferry both couches home, but that's okay. It's not like we have anything better to do. 

The guy unexpectedly shook my hand before we left, which felt SUPER WEIRD. For 5 months I've been going out of my way to avoid even walking on the same side of the road as other people, much less touching them.

I honestly think I would've been less surprised if he'd reached out and goosed me.

—3—

Before we can move the new couches in to the basement, we have to get rid of our old couch. So while we're working on that, we put the new couches in the garage.

It's funny because there's also a fridge in there, waiting for Phillip to take it apart and (hopefully) fix it.

So basically, we're starting a new house in the garage. I think I'll start referring to it as "our second home" from now on. It sounds classy.

—4—

The other night, I was just about to go downstairs and clear some space in the basement for the couches. I hadn't gone more than four steps when my son yelled, "Mom! There's a dog!"

I was confused, because we don't own a dog. There's a stray cat that roams a circuit around our yard every few days (the kids named it 'Sir Sandpooper' because I'm always muttering about how it's going to use our sandbox as a giant litterbox.)

I went back upstairs to see a very happy black dog with its nose about an inch from our sliding door on the deck, wagging its tail at me.

Oh, hello.

—5—

The dog had obviously been someone's pet, but the phone number on the tag didn't work and the dog was pretty skinny and dirty, so I think she'd been lost for a while.

We tied her up in the yard and called animal control, and for the next half-hour the kids had the time of their lives playing with her in the yard. They were frolicking around in the dusk playing fetch with a tennis ball, and it was so Normal Rockwell-like I could hardly stand it.

But I really am not a pet person, and when the animal control lady came I was relieved to let her take over. Turns out that 30 minutes of dog ownership was just right for me. I'm good for another 10 years now, at least.

—6—

This is the last and final week of The Educational Summer Vacation. The amount of complete and utter exhaustion I feel after 8 weeks of doing this makes me doubt my ability to homeschool my 16-year-old all school year but I'm trying not to think about it.

We're learning about Somalia this week, so last night Phillip and I and the teenagers watched Captain Phillips, which is based on the true story of an American ship captain who was taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009.

It was a good movie and I enjoyed it but OH MY GOSH THE ACCENT MAKE IT STOP. The ship captain was from Vermont and I don't know what Tom Hanks thought he was talking in or who he learned it from, but it was certainly not a New England accent.

After living in New England for 10 years, I feel personally attacked by the ear poison in this movie. And I say that as a native Minnesotan who didn't feel half as strongly about the accents in Fargo.

—7—

Overheard at my house:

12-year-old: What would you do if someone told you that you could eat a piece of pie but then you'd die, or you could not eat a piece of pie and you'd still die?

8-year-old: Eat pie.

12-year-old: Well, obviously.

8-year-old: Because dying with pie is better than dying without pie.

12-year-old: [nodding] Exactly. 

I'm not sure what the point was or what the moral of the story is, but I agree that if given those two options, you should probably take the pie.

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The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Cuba

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you click on them and buy something, the cost to you stays the same but I receive a small commission for referring you.

These days, every vacation you take has to happen in your imagination. But we've been doing it for years. Every summer, my kids and I take an imaginary trip around the world, picking a new country to learn about every week. 

This week we traveled to Cuba! 

Monday

To start the week, we put on some Cuban music (I like this and this,) found Cuba on the wall map, and colored the flag.

Flag is upside-down in this picture, FYI.

Cuba is the largest Caribbean island. Sometimes, it's called El Cocodrilo because it's the shape of a crocodile from an arial view. (Rumor has it there's a popular song about it, but I couldn't find it so it can't be that popular.)

Using our big wall map, the kids filled out a page of their passports. If you're interested in downloading the passport pages I use for free, here's the link:

Download the Passport Pages
We read a little bit from Cuba from the Enchantment of the World book series, and then we watched this 30-minute documentary about Cuba on Amazon Instant Video.

For dinner we had picadillo and tostones. I felt really fancy going and buying capers and pimientos in their fancy jars in the fancy aisle I never go in at the grocery store.

We actually make tostones (fried green plantains) all the time — Phillip fell in love with them when he served a religious mission in Venezuela — but the kids love helping make them because it involves smashing the plantain slices.

Kind of like playing with food, but allowed.

Tuesday

Today I thought we'd talk about the religion and the language in Cuba.

Most of Cuba is Catholic. We're Christian but not Catholic, so I picked up a book called What You Will See Inside a Catholic Church and read it with the kids over lunch.

Cuba was officially atheist under communism, but a constitutional amendment in 1992 gave Cubans freedom of religion. The pope even visited in '98.

The other uniquely Cuban religion is called Santeria, literally "way of the saints." If you're like me, the only thing you know about Santeria is that the 90's ska punk band Sublime doesn't practice it. (If you're younger than 30 and have no idea what I'm talking about, that's fine. It's not important.)

Santeria came from the Africans brought to Cuba as slaves in the 1800s. It centered on the orichas, dieties that frankly reminded me a little of the Greek gods. 

It's big on rituals meant to appease, appeal to, or summon various orichas. Frankly, it involves all kinds of stuff that is totally unfamiliar to us like animal sacrifice, curses and cleansing, charms, and fortune telling. I tried hard to find some kid-friendly videos about Santeria, and finally found this one and this one.

Then we talked about Spanish. The kids looked through a picture dictionary of 150 First Spanish Phrases and we reviewed how to count to 10 and how to say 'please' and 'thank you.'

We talked about a tradition observed in Cuba called quinceañera, the celebration of a girl's 15th birthday in a lot of Spanish-speaking cultures that probably came from ancient Mesoamerica.

After talking about quinceañera traditions, I asked my girls to make quiñcinera invitations.

This is the invitation my 16-year-old made.

If I'd thought of it earlier, I would've asked them to look up words in a Spanish-English dictionary and write the invitations in Spanish.

The national dish of Cuba is ropa vieja. Translated into English, the name means 'old clothes.' (Apparently the dish is supposed to look like a heap of colorful rags.)

I guess I... sort of see it?

I wanted to get a boxed mix to make flan for dessert, but my regular grocery store doesn't carry it anymore. So I did the next best thing and bought a can of sweetened condensed milk with a picture of flan on the label to make it at home.

For a flan recipe that was literally called "Easy Flan Recipe," we certainly had a hard time making this one. My daughter melted a spoon and I burned my hand.

At least it turned out pretty.

I usually dislike flan because the taste and texture remind me of sucking on a wet dishrag, but I do have to admit that homemade flan was slightly better.

Wednesday

Cuba has a fascinating history. First it was a Spanish colony from whom the U.S. bought a lot of sugar. When a U.S. Navy ship exploded near Cuba, the Spanish were blamed, and that was the start of the Spanish-American War.

As a result of the war, Spain gave Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the U.S. along with temporary control of Cuba. Cuba gained independence in 1902 but was still sort of controlled by the U.S.

When Fidel Castro came to power as a communist, the U.S. put a trade embargo on Cuba (that means no buying or selling between the two countries at all) that remains to this day. Cuba started getting aid and missiles from the then-USSR, (Cuban Missile Crisis, anyone?) and when the USSR fell apart Cuba was in dire straits. They're still recovering.

I gave a brief summary to the younger kids and then gave the following books to my older kids:

• Who Was Fidel Castro? and Who Was Che Guevara? from the Who Is book series
• The Cuban Missile Crisis by Helga Schier
• Cuba: After the Revolution by Bernard Wolf

Because the U.S. trade embargo means no new American cars, and new car prices in Cuba are legitimately insane, the streets of Cuba are filled with sweet rides from the 1950s that are often used as taxis. Locals call the classic car taxis of Cuba "almendrones:"

Cuba has a double currency system: Cuban pesos (CUP) and convertible Cuban pesos (CUC.) $1USD always equals 1 CUC. But Cuban pesos are worth much less, and $1USD equals about 25 Cuban pesos.

I read an article that said some taxi drivers try to give tourists their change in Cuban pesos instead of convertible pesos. We talked about exchange rates and why that would work to the driver's advantage. We looked at pictures of the two kinds of money: would the kids be able to tell the difference?

I had the older kids do some math with different amounts to figure out how much a driver might make with this trick, and what percentage of the average Cuban's monthly salary it would be. (The average Cuban salary is about $20 a month, so a few cents for for us would be significant in Cuba!)

(I should note here that I'm not good at doing math and even worse at explaining it to someone else. While this post makes it sound like I know what I'm doing, in truth I had to have the 16-year-old check everyone's math and basically explain it to me when I got confused.)

Then I practiced currency conversions with my 8-year-old. When she was pretty good at figuring out how many pesos she could trade for $1, $5, or $13 dollars, I decided to have her make up her own currency and try it with a different conversion rate.

"Money can be in dollars, pesos, rupees, Euros..." I explained. "Let's make up our own. What imaginary monetary unit do you want to have?" 

Immediately, she answered "poopies."

Yes, she was being silly, but she was still sitting there so I went with it. We did some imaginary money conversions with "poopies," and then with her next currency, "farties." 8-year-olds. Sigh.

We had arroz con pollo for dinner tonight, and I started to get the sense that all Cuban meals were basically meat, rice, and some onion and peppers. Is that about right, or did I just happen to pick recipes that were all alike?

Thursday

Son is a genre of music that originated in Cuba. Not only did the kids like seeing people dancing to son in this video, they liked seeing the fun and laid-back atmosphere.

Son is the predecessor of other musical styles like rumba (shown in this video) and salsa. My kids loved this clip of little kid salsa dancers:

'

With the help of the instructional videos here and here, we learned some basic salsa dance steps and practiced them with each other.

Some of us were more willing participants than others, and I won't name any names to protect their identities, but at least two of the kids realized that dancing is kind of fun. So I count it as a success.

I should have quit while I was ahead, because the next thing we did was a drawn-out disaster.

We tried to make some Cuban donuts called buñuelos. Sounds fun, right? Well, it took kind of a long time to make them. First I had to find some unfamiliar ingredients, then we had to boil and grind them up, and we hadn't even started making the dough yet!

Rolling them into Figure 8 shapes before frying.

The donuts themselves aren't sweet at all, the sweetness comes from a glaze you pour all over the top. I apparently overcooked the glaze, because as it cooled it got way too dark and hardened into an impenetrable cement-like coating. To top it off, it made the finished buñuelos pretty disgusting-looking.

My husband was the brave soul who bit into one of these first. I was worried his whole top row of teeth were going to pop out like dentures.

We added some more water to the glaze and it became... edible. But overall, still not a good experience. My children rated them "meh" and the house smelled funny afterward.

Sorry buñuelos, you are not our favorite.

The work-to-taste ratio was definitely not in the buñuelos' favor.

Friday and Saturday

We had family plans this weekend so there were no formal Cuba activities scheduled for Friday and Saturday, but we did bring along plenty of books set in Cuba for the kids to read. 

My kids will read anything if it's strategically placed within their reach, so it worked out pretty well.

Adult reads for the teenagers:

• Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana by Isadora Tattlin (I'm really enjoying this one)
• 90 Miles to Havana by Enrique Flores-Galbis

YA for my middle schooler:

• Refugee by Alan Gratz

Short chapter books for my elementary school kids:

• The Firefly Letters by Margarita Engle
• The Surrender Tree by Margarita Engle
• Under the Royal Palms: A Childhood in Cuba by Alma Flor Ada

We also brought along a biography of Ernest Hemingway and a copy of his short novel The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway loved Cuba and lived there for 20 years, and The Old Man and the Sea is based on an experience he had there catching a giant marlin. At some point, we'll have to watch this Oscar-winning animated version.

Overall, the kids enjoyed Cuba and had a really good time there. We learned so many cool things, from the history to the music to the currency. (We also learned that I should probably pursue a career other than math teacher or pastry chef, but that's beside the point.)

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7 Quick Takes about Struggles in the Wizarding World, Mugs for Left-Handed People, and the Untold History of Darth Vader

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

My older kids were downstairs watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. while I was upstairs with the younger kids. 

They didn't seem to be paying much attention, but every now and then the sounds of horrific crashes, shouting, and explosions from the more intense action scenes would drift upstairs.

During one particularly loud sequence of screaming, my 6-year-old looked up from the board game we were playing and said, "I think Harry Potter is having a hard time."

—2—

It's been unusually cool here for August, dropping into the 60s in the evenings. I'm actually typing this wearing gloves right now. 

My Reynaud's gets worse and worse every year. If it's below 65 degrees, my hands and feet are probably going numb, my lips may be turning slightly blue, and I'm likely pretty miserable.

In other words, I'm not suited to the climate here in New England. I'm like one of those species scientists look at and can't figure out how it managed to survive all these years. because it's just not that compatible with life in its environment.

—3—

My 14-year-old attempted a DIY marbled mug craft, and given our family's extensive history in Pinterest fails, I can't say any of us were shocked when it didn't work.

So we had this random white mug that we didn't know what to do with, and I suggested she personalize it with a magic marker.

She was thrilled at that idea because (1) she's left-handed so mug designs always go on the wrong side when she holds them, and (2) meerkats.

—4—

My kids' school finally published their fall reopening plan, and in related news, I've officially lost the will to live.

The middle and high school are actually going back in person full-time, but the younger grades are doing a hybrid model where they're in school two days a week and remotely learning at home for three.

I don't mind a hybrid learning model, but looking at what the kids will be doing on "remote learning" days makes me want to cry.

Instead of covering the assigned material on your own time like they did last year, the kids are now scheduled for several hours a day of "synchronous instruction" with the kids physically in the classroom, with breaks for snack and lunch.

Okay, but unless they're playing Minecraft I can guarantee my 1st grader isn't going to sit there behaving (or even misbehaving) in front of the computer for three hours.

And after he takes a break for lunch or snack or whatever, he's going to be DONE. I know this kid, and I'm telling you he'd rather gouge his eyes out with a spoon than go back to the computer for more school after snacktime (again, unless the lesson plan is "Minecraft for beginners.")

But I'm trying to breathe and be rational about this. Every parent has my same concerns right now. No kid wants to sit interminably in front of a screen. The teachers know that. The schedule maybe has to look that way on paper because there are laws about how many hours kids have to be "in school," but in real life it will end up being realistic, doable, and fine. I won't be reduced to an alarm clock nagging my kids to get on the Internet every 20 minutes for the rest of the 2020-2021 school year. Right? RIGHT??

—5—

Speaking of school, my 9th grader got her course schedule for the fall. Apparently there wasn't room in any of the electives she wanted, so they gave her a study hall.

She doesn't want a study hall so she emailed the guidance counselor, who then "fixed" the situation by randomly placing her in beginning guitar instead.

Since my daughter has precisely zero desire to ever learn to play the guitar, this isn't exactly an improvement.

Between this and the elementary school hybrid plan, it took all the self-restraint I had not to call the superintendent and just do a long horror movie-style scream into the receiver.

—6—

I appreciate how UPS is getting into the social distancing spirit.

Their new marketing campaign is highlighting the "ing" part of all the stuff you can do at the UPS Store: shipping, printing, faxing, etc. Clever. You can do all the verbs with UPS.

I was in there mailing a package the other day, and noticed the stickers on the floor telling customers where to stand in line so we weren't too close together:

Well played, UPS. Well played.

—7—

The show The Mandelorian has rekindled my kids' love for all things Star Wars, so among other things, they've been watching Bad Lip Reading clips of Star Wars on YouTube. 

If you don't know Bad Lip Reading, the basic concept is that they take clips from movies and TV shows and dub over them with funny things it looks like the characters could've been saying instead.

Some are better than others, but I think this one is my favorite:

What's the best thing you stumbled across on the Internet this week?

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The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Saudi Arabia

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you click on them and buy something, the cost to you is the same but I receive a small commission for referring you.

I can't believe it's already Week 6 of our Educational Summer Vacation! 

Every summer, my kids pick one country a week and we try to immerse ourselves in the culture as best we can: we listen to the music, learn some of the language, try the food, and study its history. This week we traveled to Saudi Arabia.

Or, if you're my 4-year-old, "Saubi Aradia." He's working on it.

Monday

We started the week by finding Saudi Arabia on the wall map.

The kids filled out their passport pages (free to download here) with information on the capital city, bordering waters and countries, and physical features. They also get to make up a visa stamp and draw it.

Saudi Arabia is the largest country in the Middle East. It's also a relatively new country, founded in 1932. Here is the flag:

The writing is the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.

We watched this intro video about Saudi Arabia, which at 8K is pretty much higher resolution than real life, I think. It certainly looked pretty on our TV.

I also set out some Saudi Arabia-themed books for the kids to read during the week. 

My 8-year-old liked Yatimah from the Horse Diaries series and Dear Whiskers by Ann Whitehead Nagada.

My 16-year-old liked Daring to Drive by Manal al-Sharif and On Saudi Arabia by Karen Elliott House (both of them are adult fiction and not YA, so read with your own discretion.) I also set out Saudi Arabia from the Enchantment of the World series.

Tuesday

Today I sat the kids down and said "We're going to learn about Islam" and my 8-year-old wailed, "But we already leeeeeaaaaaarned about Islam!" 

Sorry, dear, but there are a lot of Muslim countries.

In Islam, Saudi Arabia is particularly important because it's home to the two most sacred Muslim sites: Mecca and Medina. In fact, the king of Saudi Arabia is called "the custodian of the two holy mosques."

We read a beautiful picture book called Muhammad by Demi and talked about how Mecca is where Muhammad was born. 

I knew Muslims face the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca when they pray, but I didn't really know much about the what, when, or why of the Kaaba. We learned where Muslims believe it came from and about the sacred black stone at the corner. There is even an interior to the Kaaba, which I didn't even know before today.

We read the picture book Going to Mecca by Na'ima B. Robert, and I gave my older kids Muhammad of Mecca: Prophet of Islam. My 16-year-old will be all over reading that book and learning about the different conflicts between Islamic and non-Islamic world during Muhammad's lifetime.

Medina is the second holiest site in Saudi Arabia, because Muhammad's tomb is beneath the Mosque of the Prophet, under a large green dome. He is buried behind the ornate green doors in this video (although I'm not sure anyone ever gets to go inside.)

Modeling it after the idea on this site, we made a Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) game. The kids decorated a spraypainted black box like the Kaaba, cut out a circular gameboard, and glued on pieces of paper in a counter-clockwise direction. 

Gameplay was a lot like Trouble, actually.

Participants in the Hajj go around the Kaaba 7 times, so we each had 7 pieces and rolled a die to get them around the Kaaba first.

My 4- and 6-year-olds wanted to play so that pieces could share a space, but my 8-year-old wanted players to send each other back to the start if you land on their space. Now that was an intense Hajj.

Wednesday

Saudi Arabia has two police forces. There are the regular police, and then there are the religious police, called the Mutaween.

As we learned in this video, Saudi Arabia isn't the only country to have religious police. But it's probably the most famous for it. Saudi Arabia follows Sharia Law, and besides that, most of the country is part of a conservative sect of Islam called Wahhābism. 

We watched one more video about the religious police and then read this article about what kinds of things they enforce and prohibit. Drinking and smoking, women being in the company of male non-relatives, and even too-Western customs like Valentine's Day are all against the rules.

Things are slowly changing. As of 2016, the religious police aren't allowed to arrest or punish offenders; instead they're supposed to report them to the regular police. In 2009, Saudi Arabia's first co-ed university opened, and women have been allowed to vote since 2015 and drive since 2018. In 2018, Saudi Arabia also started allowing non-Muslim tourist travel into the country.

The next thing we did was have a debate about the idea of having "morality police." My four oldest kids drew lots and had to argue for or against, then I had them switch and argue on the other side.

Maybe that will work better once they're all in high school, because our debate devolved pretty quickly into "Yeah? Well, you're a poopyhead!" and "It takes one to know one."

We'll try again in a few years.

For dinner tonight, we had the national dish of Saudi Arabia. It's called al kabsa.

Such a pretty meal.

I was impressed. It was kind of time-consuming and required a bunch of different pots, but now that I've been through the process once it wouldn't be so bad to do it again. Which I probably will — it was good!

Thursday

95% of Saudi Arabia is desert, so let's talk a little about that. 

The plants there are xerophytic, which means they can live without very much water.

The animal life there includes wolves, hyenas, foxes, honey badgers, mongooses, porcupines, baboons, hedgehogs, hares, sand rats, and jerboa. Since I knew my kids would love them, we watched a video about jerboas.

They are so sad they can't have one as a pet.

Did you know there are no rivers in Saudi Arabia? Only wadis, which are seasonal. We watched a video about Saudi Arabia's water problem, agriculture, and how they're currently getting their drinking water. 

Then we learned about the Crown Prince Camel Festival. Camels are such a part of Saudi culture, it's like horse-lovers in the U.S. I was completely riveted by this video about the million-dollar camel race during the festival.

This longer video about the festival gave more details about the race, but other events like the camel beauty contest (kind of like a dog show, but for camels.) My kids couldn't believe that some people will try to cheat by injecting their camels with Botox.

Inspired and finding ourselves with a 99-cent pack of balloons on our hands, we decided to hold our own camel race of sorts. 

Two of the race contestants.

Have you ever done balloon rockets? Well, we did something similar. Our resident artist (my 16-year-old) drew camels on the balloons and we set up two parallel strings right next to each other so we could race. 

My 8-year-old also joined the camel race.

The races weren't terribly successful, but we had fun and liked looking at the teeny-tiny camels on the balloons after they deflated.

After we were done, I gave them the book Can You Survive the Desert? An Interactive Survival Adventure. 

Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books from when we were kids, where you turn to different pages depending on what decisions you make? This is the same idea. I love these books because there are multiple stories in one.

Friday

Bedouin means "dwellers in the desert" in Arabic. There are still Bedouin nomads living the same lifestyle they did thousands of years ago, so we watched a video about them.

And Native Bedouin poetry, known as nabaṭī, is extremely popular in Saudi Arabia. It loses almost all of its poetic nature when translated into English, though, and this article made us all think about why.

We haven't played with out magnetic poetry sets for years, but this was a great time to pull them out of the attic and let the kids create some poetry.

My 14-year-old wrote a poem about camels in the desert, made significantly more challenging my the fact that our magnetic poetry set didn't contain the word "camel." But I think she did a good job:

She had to get creative with tenses and spellings to say what she wanted to say.

Others of us just have really high self-esteem and aren't afraid to show it:

My attempts to go over the parts of speech with my 8-year-old were less than successful, but she did enjoy making some silly sentences:

Not pictured are any of my 12-year-old son's poems, which all prominently featured the word "butt." Whoever put that word in the magnetic poetry set definitely had him in mind as their target demographic.

Saturday

Saudi Arabia produces the most oil of anyplace in the world. We looked at the book Oil from the Eyewitness Books series and found out how many products are made using oil (hint: it's a lot.)

We learned about how oil is formed under the ground (this video was good for the little kids and this video was good for the big ones.)

But how do they get the oil out of the ground? I've seen those oil derricks bobbing up and down before, but I never really understood how that worked so I thought this video was interesting. 

The last thing we needed to see in Saudi Arabia was to watch the national dance being performed. It's a martial line dance called "Al Ardha," performed by men wielding swords and chanting to drums. If you were paying attention, you saw a little bit of it in the camel festival video from Thursday.

To cap off the week, I thought it would be appropriate to make some Saudi Arabian cookies using this recipe. (After all, there's never an inappropriate time to make cookies.)

Date-filled deliciousness.

I wasn't sure what to expect but these were delicious. They were like Fig Newtons but way better, because Medjool dates blow figs out of the water.

Our week in Saudi Arabia ended up being so much fun. We learned about the world, got outside, did some silly things, and had some good food. You really can't ask for a better week than that.

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