The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Ireland

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We learned about Northern Ireland a few years ago when we covered the U.K. for The Educational Summer Vacation, but this year it was time for the kids to learn about the Republic of Ireland!

This week we were learning about everything from hurling to Irish language (yes, there is one) to the Celts to the food. And I bought so many potatoes, you guys.

A few Ireland-themed fiction books I gave the kids to read on their own:

• Journey through Ash and Smoke from the Ranger in Time series (for 2nd-5th grade)
• Leprechaun in Late Winter from the Magic Tree House series and its nonfiction research companion
• Tales from Old Ireland (a picture book collection of short bedtime stories)
• Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (an adult novel but appropriate for teens)

Monday

We got our first introduction to the Emerald Isle with the book This is Ireland by M. Sasek. (To be honest, the cadence of the words was a little weird and hard to follow, but kids just look at the pictures in picture books so it's all good.)

With some Irish music in the background, the kids found Ireland on the wall map and filled out a page in their passports. Free printable passport pages are here, you're welcome.

My daughter looked up the Irish flag and the youngest two kids colored it to add to our wall.

We watched a Globe Trekker DVD about Ireland, but this beautiful 4k video on YouTube is a good substitute if you're rushed for time.

For dinner we had Irish stew pie and it was so delicious. I mean, I don't even know why it was so good, the ingredients were nothing unusual. I am definitely making this again.

Not the prettiest thing but holy cow the taste.

Irish folklore is full of fairies, leprechauns, goddesses, and heroes. In fact, the DVD we watched earlier today talked about a famous Irish giant named Finn McCool. And since we happened to have a book on loan from the library called Finn McCool and the Great Fish by Eve Bunting. the younger kids heard it for a bedtime story.

Tuesday

We started off Tuesday with the book S is for Shamrock. I must be tired because I didn't realize why all the kids were laughing until they informed me I said it was called "S is for Scottland." Close, Jenny. So close.

Then we learned about two of Ireland's sports, Gaelic football and hurling (the female version is called 'camogie.')

Gaelic football is sort of a cross between soccer, basketball, and American football. We read about it and watched the video here.

Hurling is like all that but with the addition of wooden paddles, so we all went outside and tried a hurling match. Just kidding, someone would've needed to go to the emergency room after 10 minutes. That game looks brutal.

No, what we really did was watch a clip from Riverdance. It's a little sensationalized and not exactly true Irish dancing because they do use their arms a little, but it's close enough for us to at least get a feel for it.

We then attempted to watch this instructional video on how to do a basic Irish dance step and couldn't do it, even a little bit, even when the instructor put the video in slow motion and even when we watched it three times.

Dinner tonight was colcannon potatoes and Irish soda bread. Was it really a meal? Maybe not. But Phillip was out of town on a work trip and when he's gone we always have dinners that aren't real food (like parfaits or cereal,) and I figured why break tradition?

My kids begged me not to put raisins in this soda bread but liked it in the end. Most of them, anyway.

Wednesday

Each of the kids took a turn picking a question and reading the answer from Ireland Q&A by Mary Dodson Wade, and then we took a dive into the Irish language.

Does Ireland have its own language? Yes! A lot of Irish people can't speak it after hundreds of years of colonization (humorously depicted here,) but it exists. We learned how to say hello, goodbye, please and thank you with this video, and it took some practice but I think we pronounce them passably now.

Today Irish is written with the Latin alphabet we know and love, but in the 4th century A.D. it was written using a language called Ogham, otherwise known as "the tree language." 

Today, almost 400 "Ogham stones" (stones with Ogham inscriptions) exist in and around Ireland. The kids looked at these pictures and did these free printable worksheets from BBC to learn how to read Ogham.

Even the 5-year-old got how to decode this, so I was impressed.

One of the older kids put the younger ones to bed while I was running around picking the teenagers and dropping them off (Phillip was still out of town,) so I asked them to read Tim O'Toole and the Wee Folk as a bedtime story. 

I didn't hear the details but they said they weren't ready to take it back to the library yet so it must've been good.

Thursday

We reviewed our Irish words from yesterday with another video, and then moved on to the Celts. Celtic people arrived in Ireland in about 500 B.C. Their religion celebrated nature and the seasons, so we talked briefly about that and I gave my 17-year-old a book called The Ancient Celtic Festivals and How We Celebrate Them Today since I knew she'd be interested.

Next we put on some Celtic music and learned about different kinds of Celtic knots. I printed out these diagrams for the kids and had them find each knot as I read to them about each of their meanings.

The little kids wanted to color their diagrams while the older kids and I tried out a few with ropes, and my oldest two girls tried to follow this tutorial on how to do a Celtic knot hairstyle on each other.

Pretty good, I think!

For lunch, we made soft pretzels but instead of twisting them into the traditional pretzel shape or symbols from Harry Potter like the kids usually do, we tried making them into Celtic knots.

Attempting Solomon's Knot.

Can you find each one on the diagram?

The Love Knot was probably my favorite.

Turns out that the Sailor's Knot was easier with dough than rope because it didn't slide around so much.

I didn't expect this to be such a fun activity, or for the kids to be so into it, or for it to take so long. Or for there to be so, so much flour all over the kitchen when we were done.

Friday

Today was all about iconic features of Ireland, starting with St. Patrick. 

We read a picture book called Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland, and then watched a short video documentary about the pilgrimage 40,000 Catholics make every year up a mountain called Croagh Patrick. Coincidentally, it's on the last Sunday in July which just happened.

Next up was Blarney Castle and the famous Blarney Stone you can kiss for the "gift of gab" (i.e: eloquent speaking.) Someone kissed the stone in this History Channel mini-documentary, and my 9-year-old yelled, "During Coronavirus?!? That's a terrible idea!"

"It's okay," the 5-year-old answered. "He's probably fully vaccinated." (Read this with a slight lisp to get the full effect.)

Lastly, we read about potatoes and the infamous Irish Potato Famine in 1845-1849. Even though potatoes are practically synonymous with Ireland today, they're actually not native plants. The potato was imported to Ireland in the 17th century.

Remember all those potatoes I bought? We used several of them to carve into stamps of whatever design the kids wanted. A good tutorial is this one if you've never done it before.

A moose, a smiley face, shamrocks, a Celtic trinity knot, and Darth Vader.

Again, it was fun but a huge mess.

I wanted to make Dublin coddle for dinner tonight but I didn't read the recipe closely enough, ran out of time, and ended up throwing the ingredients together in a dish I would call loosely inspired by Dublin coddle and not particularly picture-worthy.

This weekend, we'll try again with corned beef and cabbage. Which I know needs to go in the slow cooker for a while so this time I'll be ready.

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7 Quick Takes about Paper Problems, College in Real Life, and Cantankerous Old Kindergartners

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

—1—

I ordered the wrong size printer paper off Amazon. I didn't even notice the size difference at first, but after I printed a few things that didn't come out quite right, I compared it to a sheet in our recycling bin and sure enough:

Old paper on the left, new paper on the right.

When I showed Phillip, he said, "They're not even close to the same size!"

Okay, fine genius. When I put them side-by-side for you like that, I can see it, too.

Apparently, international A4 paper is ¼ inch shorter on one dimension and ½ inch longer in the other dimension than standard North American 8.5"x11" inch letter paper. #themoreyouknow

Until this pack runs out, I guess I'll just be cutting off the extra ½ inch when I print stuff I need to look normal and hope no one notices.

—2—

I just rewatched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty  with my kids. We watched it because it was partially set in and filmed in Iceland, and we talked about Iceland last week for The Educational Summer Vacation. (Bonus: I'd completely forgotten the main character also goes to Afghanistan, which we're doing next week.)

I have to admit, I was underwhelmed the first time I saw this movie a few years ago. But I appreciated it a lot more the second time around. 

In that way it reminds me of Big Fish. The first time I saw it I just thought it was weird, but it's now one of my absolute favorites.

—3—

My teenager just told me about a duo of Russian conceptualist artists called Komar and Melamid. Back in the '90s, they polled people about their most-disliked features of music and mashed them all into one song called "The Most Unwanted Music in the World." 

According to Wikipedia, the song includes "bagpipes, cowboy music, an opera singer rapping, and a children's choir that urged listeners to go shopping at Walmart." I know, it's as delightful as it sounds. (You can listen to it here, but I suspect it's the kind of thing only 17-year-olds up way past their bedtime can truly appreciate.)

Komar and Melamid also did the most wanted and unwanted art, and I thought it was pretty funny. 

—4—

And the deluge of "come to my college" junk mail for my high school almost-senior continues. We've never gotten so much mail in our lives.

I usually just toss them without reading, but this one made me do a double take:

At first, I misread it as 'IRL School.' I stared at it for a minute, wondering if this was a new institution pitching itself to teens who've had enough of virtual learning during COVID: "Sick of going to class on your computer? Try college IRL: in real life!"

Which actually would be a great marketing strategy, in my opinion.

—5—

When was the last time you were stung by a bee? I got stung for the first time since childhood a couple of years back and was surprised at how much it hurt! 

A few weeks ago my 7-year-old somehow got a bee in his shoe during a hike, and yesterday my 9-year-old got some bees/wasps mad by accident while they were building a fort and got stung three times. She ran home crying for what had to have been half a mile through the woods with her brother, poor thing.

Luckily, I just found out about this product called Sting-Kill. I'm sure there are other brands out there, but it's a disposable anesthetic swab that really helped. 

Why did they not have this when I was a kid?? I'm now preaching about it on street corners and know for a fact that at least one person started shopping for it on Amazon while I was talking to her.

 

—6—

My 5-, 7-, 9-, and 13-year olds are taking swim lessons. The place I love was shut down for COVID last year, and is still  not doing lessons this year, so we got set up with the adult son of a friend who's home from school giving lessons in their pool this summer.

He's great, especially with my 5-year-old who is going through a serious curmudgeonly old man phase right now. Everything is "the worst" and whenever they're going to start learning something new, he groans loudly "oh, no." 

He reminds me of Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets.

—7—

Thank you for everyone who's been keeping my 15-year-old in their thoughts and prayers. (She has a violin-induced repetitive stress injury to her wrist and can't play, although we were really hoping she would recover by fall to start with her new youth symphony.)

That's a bummer, but it's okay. Her teacher had to take 6 months off for an injury and delay her graduation from Juilliard, so it's not like it couldn't have come at a worse time.

One good thing about this is that she's in physical therapy now, learning how to heal better this time and hopefully prevent it next time. At her session this week, the therapist was playing 80's classic rock. 

Let me tell you, PT exercises aren't exciting (i.e: now do 3 sets of 15 squeezes on this rubber ball,) but they somehow seem more epic to Guns N' Roses.

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The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Iceland

This post contains affiliate links, so if you click on them and buy something I get a small commission for referring you - but the cost stays the same to you! 

Happy 10-year anniversary to The Educational Summer Vacation! You can read about how it all started here, but every summer my kids and I take the only kind of vacation around the world we can afford: the one in our minds. 

This week we "traveled" to Iceland, and here's how it went. 

Monday

After finding Iceland on our big wall map, the kids colored the national flag of Iceland and put it on the wall next to the previous years' flags.

Using the map, they filled out these free printable passport pages, while I read to them from a book called, appropriately, Iceland. Some of their favorite facts:

• A person's last name is their father's first name followed by -dottir or -son. First names for babies must be approved by the government.
• Many rock formations in Iceland are said to be trolls that turned into stone.
• Jolabokaflod  is Icelandic for "Christmas book flood." To my kids' delight, Iceland is a country of bookworms. You can read more about Jolabokaflod  here.

We then watched a DVD called Iceland: Countries Around the World. Whenever we "visit" a new country I always check if the library has one of the DVDs from this series. They're 15 minutes long and follow the day in the life of a child from that country. They're fantastic!

(I briefly considered showing the kids some Bjork videos, but ultimately decided that they thought the '90s were weird enough already. No need to prove it.)

That night we had Icelandic cocoa soup for dessert, which was basically hot chocolate but less sweet. I liked it, but the kids asked for marshmallows.

Tuesday

The Icelandic alphabet has 32 letters, many of which we don't have in English. I printed out this for the kids to color while we watched a very helpful Icelander pronouncing each one. (He starts at 50 seconds in.)

I loved the 9-year-old's creativity. She made the 'B' into an Icelandic flag and the 'O' into an arctic fox (the only native land mammal to Iceland.) I think she ran out of Iceland-themed ways to decorate the rest of the letters, though, because this was only our second day learning about the country.

The coloring occupied the kids long enough for us to practice counting from 1 to 10 in Icelandic and watch this video on how Iceland is attempting to fight language extinction.

I think it's pretty awesome that Iceland is so active in trying to preserve their language. In fact, it's so close to Old Norse that the 10-year-old girl in yesterday's video could roughly translate 1,000-year-old Icelandic sagas well enough to get the gist of what was going on.

(For comparison's sake, try that with Beowulf in Old English, which was written about the same time. I dare you.)

For more on the language, this article is a fun one. I had the kids guess at some of the compound words Iceland has invented to avoid incorporation foreign words, like sjónvarp  ("light" + "projection" = "television") and ísskápur  ("ice" + "closet" = "fridge.") 

Then just for fun, we watched this fun karaoke video. I actually got really excited to hear some words I recognized already.

Did you hear when he said Plokkfiskur at the end? Well, that's what we had for dinner tonight. (My 5-year-old kept calling it 'plock-fister.')

Plokkfiskur  is an Icelandic fish stew and served with rye bread. None of the kids were crazy about it, although it seemed pretty unoffensive to me. 

In any case, it seemed way more palatable than traditional Icelandic food like fermented shark. Maybe I should've started with that.

Wednesday

Iceland is called "The Land of Fire and Ice," and today we learned why: the country is famous for its volcanoes and its glaciers. 

The Vatnajökull is the biggest and most famous glacier in Iceland, as we learned in this video. Apparently 11% of Iceland is covered in glaciers.

There are also lots of volcanoes in Iceland, since it's sitting on the Mid-Atlantic ridge. There are actually 30 active volcanoes there now, and Iceland experiences a volcano eruption about every 5 years. We watched a little bit of this video and looked at the pictures in Life on Surtsey by Loree Griffin Burns to learn about a new island off Iceland that was created by an eruption in 1963.

.

Also, no visit to Iceland (real or imaginary) would be complete without the Northern Lights. This beautiful YouTube video about the folklore surrounding the Northern Lights and the science behind them was a must-watch:

Our world is so cool, you guys.

My 17-year-old was nice enough to let us use her art pastels for this project, and the finished products turned out to be so amazing. They're hanging in the dining room right now and I love having them up there.

When everything was finally cleaned up, I quietly left the book Northern Lights out on the table. I know my kids, and if it's there they will definitely read it.

For dinner, we had breaded lamb chop with spiced red cabbage and carmelized potatoes. Well, sort of. I could only find ground lamb at my grocery store so I made do with veal. They're both baby animals... that makes them the same, right?

Don't answer that.

Tonight's bedtime story was Stúfur and the Snowman. It was a silly story the little kids enjoyed, but my favorite part was the blurb at the beginning explaining Icelandic Christmas traditions. 

In Iceland they don't have Santa Claus, they have the Yule Lads: 13 Christmas men who visit one at a time on the 13 days before Christmas to leave gifts in children's shoes if they've been good. Naughty children get a potato, to which all six of my kids yelled, "I want a potato!" (Now at least I know what kind of behavior to expect for the next 5 months.)

Thursday

This was the day we learned about Iceland's history, which my 13-year-old had been waiting for all week. 

When I was prepping last week, he watched this video on the Cod Wars with me and thought it was so hilarious he started programming a video game on Scratch featuring two dueling codfish. (There are no shortage of funny YouTube videos on the Cod Wars, incidentally. I guess I should expect this with a quirky war bearing a humorous-sounding name.)

Actually, he drew this first, which gave him the idea for the game.

Then we learned about the Viking explorer Leif Eriksson, watching part of a Globe Trekker DVD from the library and reading the book Who Was Leif Eriksson? 

To make the idea of being an explorer a little more hands-on, we talked about how it's important for explorers to be able to know which direction they're going. The older kids taught the younger ones how to use a compass, then conveniently disappeared when I announced we were going on a walk in the woods behind our house. 

 

We often walk on this trail, but this time I stopped periodically and asked the kids to consult the compass to find which direction we were facing. The rest of the time I spent yelling at them to keep out of the poison ivy on the sides of the trail.

Friday

Today was dedicated to learning about Iceland's animals.

We looked at pictures of Icelandic ponies in this book, and my horse-riding daughter told us what differences she noticed between them and the Quarter Horse she rides at her barn.

Then we read about arctic foxes, but mostly my 9-year-old wanted to tell us everything she knew about them from recently doing an arctic fox report in school.

We also looked up some short and sweet puffin facts for kids. Did you know that 60% of the world's puffins live in Iceland? (They're also eaten as a delicacy there, which we didn't dwell on too much.)

The older kids made some cute penguin/puffin bookmarks (especially appropriate since Icelanders love books so much) following this tutorial.:

The crossed eyes kill me every time.

Meanwhile, the 5- and 7-year-olds did this quick and easy science experiment about why puffins don't get wet. 

I wasn't sure how into it they'd be, but I think I underestimated the appeal of the spray bottle. They could have done this all day.

We also made ice cream. Icelanders love their ice cream, so we kind of had to. Because learning.

I've always been scared of ice cream recipes that call for eggs, but I found this peach ice cream recipe and decided that the whole purpose of The Educational Summer Vacation is to learn new things so it was time to try it.

Unfortunately, we thought the resulting ice cream was a little bland and definitely not worth the effort.

Saturday

For our last day, we talked about two popular sports in Iceland: glima and handball. 

Glima is a type of Scandinavian wrestling said to be handed down from the Vikings. We watched this video to learn about it, but only the first 2 minutes before it goes into the glima wrestler's life story.

Handball is the national sport of Iceland. I didn't know anything about it, but this video explained it as sort of a mixture of basketball, soccer, and ice hockey. 

With plenty of modifications, we went to the yard and played a crude makeshift version of handball. (The kids asked if we could try glima instead and I was like haha no.)

Do you remember those pictures of Ridiculously Photogenic Guy running a marathon? Throwing this ball is my Ridiculously Photogenic Mom moment.

I'm sure it bore little resemblance to the actual game of handball, but we all had fun and no one quit and stomped in the house crying, so I think it was a huge success.

Our week "visiting" Iceland was a lot of fun: we got outside, made some wall art, and learned a lot of new things. We didn't get around to watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which was partially set and filmed in Iceland. I can see almost all of my kids finding it entertaining (even if they also find it a little weird,) so hopefully we can still squeeze it in next week.  

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7 Quick Takes about Cute Snacks that Don't Work, a Foray into Foraging, and Discovering New Playlists (Each One Weirder Than the Last)

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

—1—

While I was out doing errands, Phillip took the kids on a short hike in the woods. All except my 15-year-old, who decided not to go with them and instead take her own walk near the house.

When Phillip and the other kids got home, the 9-year-old was saying, "Poor you. I would hate to go on a walk all alone."

The 15-year-old shrugged and answered, "I like to think."

"Ugh," the 9-year-old grunted and shivered. I'm pretty sure she meant walking alone, but then again, I can't be sure it wasn't the thinking part that she found so distasteful. It was kind of ambiguous.

—2—

My teenagers have been such good sports this week. First they accompanied me and the little kids to a playground out of the goodness of their hearts, and later we went to a new spray park/pool I heard about that turned out to be a wading  pool, not a swimming pool (oops.)

In each case, they made the best of it, had fun playing with the little kids, and hung out with each other talking about whatever teenagers talk about.

There really is something great about having your youngest be 5 and your oldest be 17, though. The teens get to be kids for a little while longer and honestly, I'd have no idea what to do if we could only do big kid stuff all the time! 

—3—

I'm not a mom who does crafts or anything cute, but my underweight 7-year-old would always rather play than eat and I thought I'd try my hand at making some whimsical kid snacks for him.

You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about:

By the way, my kids would refuse all of this because the different types of foods are "touching."

So here's what I slapped together. What do you think?

Follow me on Pinterest.

I'll have you know it went just as well as I thought it would: he turned the banana into a frowny face and wouldn't eat it.

At least I didn't lose 20 minutes of my life sculpting an owl out of a rice cake.

—4—

Remember that hike in the woods Phillip took the kids on? Well, it's been really rainy lately and the mushrooms in the woods on that walk were crazy. They saw every size, shape, and color imaginable, and that got him interested in edible mushrooms. 

After a lot of research, he brought home some chantarelles to fry up with some butter and onion. (I agreed to go along with it after I texted pictures to a friend who knows all about mushroom foraging and got the green light, and after he promised to only eat one and if he wasn't dead by morning he could have the rest.)

I still haven't tried the mushrooms yet. I'm going to wait a week to see if he dies, just to be safe.

—5—

We're learning about Iceland this week for The Educational Summer Vacation. One of the reasons I really like doing this is because it's a way to discover new foods and activities we like that we never would've discovered otherwise.

We regularly eat food at home that I never would have known about, like al kabsa from Saudi Arabia or pastel de choclo from Chile. We also learned about batik egg dying while learning about Ukraine, and now that the kids are older we do the real thing every Easter. 

This week I learned about an Icelandic rock band called Sigur Rós, and I'm actually listening to them right now while writing this. It's really different from other music I've ever heard.


Is ethereal the right word to describe this? It sounds to me like the approved soundtrack for watching the Northern Lights or some equally breathtaking natural phenomenon. 

—6—

Speaking of music, the other night we invited some friends over for a bonfire and were looking for some music to listen to. I searched playlists on Spotify and found ones with the funniest and most specific names. 

Eventually I clicked on one called "Songs That Will Make You Feel Like the Main Character," although just out of curiosity I may have to go back and check out the one above it called "Foreign Relations Playlist."

It reminds me of a few days ago when my 15-year-old was helping peel potatoes for dinner. I said we needed some background music so she went on YouTube and found a playlist called, no joke, "Music to Peel Potatoes To." 

The moral of the story is that there's some weird stuff on the Internet.

—7—

If you get email notifications that Unremarkable Files has a new post, did you notice today's email looking any different? 

Recently I had to switch to a new service, because the old one changed their business model. (Rude.) I spent last night putting new 'subscribe' bars on the blog's sidebar and footer. How does it look? Does it work? 

And if you're like "You can get email notifications?!" then go ahead and sign up! No spam, you'll just get an email when there's a new post on Unremarkable Files.

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Have a good Friday, everybody. You've earned it.

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