The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Cambodia

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As it happened, we had 6 free weeks this summer and I have 6 kids, so each one picked a different country of the world to learn about for a week. It gives us some structure for the summer, and we find ourselves doing, eating, and learning things we probably never would have otherwise.

My 7-year-old knew right away which country he wanted to pick: a classmate of his from Cambodia last year talked about her country for show-and-tell and it must've made quite the impression on him!

Monday

The first thing we did was pull out our crayons and make the Cambodian flag. My 13-year-old copied down the temple in the middle and the 5- and 7-year-old colored around it. 

While researching, we saw several claims online that Cambodia is the only flag that features a building and the kids were all like, "Nuh-uh! We just did Afghanistan and their flag has a mosque." So they're learning something, evidently.

While I read Cambodia from the Countries We Come From series, the kids found Cambodia on the map and filled out their passports. I started keeping the kids' pages from year to year because of their cute handwriting and misspellings, but even if you just throw them away afterward it still gets them searching the map and thinking about what's on there.

(We have this big wall map and the passport pages are a free printable here.)

We then watched Cambodia from the Globe Trekker series. I don't know how many of these videos there are, but we've seen at least a dozen of them. The host - who's starting to feel like a personal friend of mine after all this time - essentially takes you along on a vacation to a different country every episode. My teenager thinks he's funny.

In Cambodian folk tales, you'll come across an interesting character called Judge Rabbit. For a bedtime story, we read Judge Rabbit and the Tree Spirit by Lina Mao Wall. 

The moral of the Judge Rabbit stories seems to be that ignorance and pride get you nowhere. Not sure if my kids got that message, but they enjoyed the pictures regardless.

Tuesday

It's a little hard to find online resources to learn Khmer, the language of Cambodia, but we did our best today.

First we learned a few Khmer phrases from this guy, and then we learned to count from 1 to 10 here. Khmer is by far the easiest language to remember numbers in, because it essentially goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5-1, 5-2, 5-3, 5-4, 10. Easy, right?

Khmer (also called Cambodian) shares a lot of features with Thai, which my kids remembered from last summer. They have a similar script and share a general sound, but Khmer isn't a tonal language like Thai is.

We watched someone writing in Khmer to see what the script looks like, and then learned just a little about the alphabet. Khmer has the longest alphabet in the world, actually, with 74 letters (although some of them aren't currently used.)

You can print off a coloring page here, but my kids chose to use some of these handwriting practice worksheets from Facebook instead.

The 15-year-old.

The 9-year-old.

The 7-year-old.

Wednesday

Cambodia is probably most famous for Angkor Wat, the ancient stone temple that is positively gigantic. The Khmer Empire built it in the 12th century, but they died out and the city of Angkor was completely lost to the jungle.

Some French explorer randomly stumbled upon it 900 years later, probably looking for somewhere private to go to the bathroom. What would it have been like to be that guy?

We watched this mini-documentary on Angkor and then saw some 4K videos of Angkor Wat to get a feel for what it's like to visit there.

It wasn't the greatest quality YouTube video you'll ever see, but the kids liked watching the traditional Apsara dancers at Angkor Wat here.

Originally, Angkor Wat was a Hindu temple, but it was later converted to a Buddhist temple as Buddhism became the main religion of the area.

We reviewed what we knew with Buddhism from the DK Eyewitness Books series, and then did some Buddhist-style meditation with the help of a guided meditation script for me to read out loud. 

The older teens said they almost fell asleep (which is good, I think?) and the 7-year-old sneaked out in the middle to go play Minecraft, so I think I know now where each of my kids falls in terms of mindfulness.

For dinner, we had this Khmer curry. I had really high hopes after reading the recipe: it had great explanations, pictures of unfamiliar ingredients (I often have to Google them), and promised to be "not too out of reach for the average American home cook."

Meh.

Sadly, it did not live up to my expectations.

It took a long time to make, and the shrimp paste it called for smelled SO BAD. Like, think of the worst thing you've ever smelled and then ferment it, and that might give you sort of an idea of what shrimp paste smells like. I now have an entire bottle of the stuff in my fridge and I'm afraid to get rid of it, worrying that if I throw it in the trash it will leach out and poison the water supply.

ANYWHO.

For a bedtime story, I read a cute folk tale about four jungle animals called The Last King of Angkor Wat by Graeme Base. The kids liked it and the pictures were pretty.

Thursday

After the Khmer empire died out in the 1400s, the French colonized Cambodia. You can still see French influence and names around the country, and some people still speak French in addition to Khmer.

A particularly gory part of Cambodia's history came next, when a communist group known as the Khmer Rouge (French for "red Khmers") took over in 1975. 

In four years, they killed 2 million people: a fifth of the population of Cambodia. Because of that and also civil war afterward, half the country is under 25.

I read the picture book A Half Spoon of Rice by Icy Smith was a compelling story (I could tell because they were listening very, very quietly) and gives some historical context in the back. A Song for Cambodia by Michelle Lord is about the power of music for a young boy who was allowed to play  for the soldiers during the time of the Khmer Rouge, so we next decided to look up the instrument he played which was called the khim.

(A little freeze dancing to this video of someone playing the khim is a great way to burn off some nervous energy if necessary after all that.)

In 1993, the civil wars were finally over and a king started ruling Cambodia. You can see pictures of the royal palance in Phnom Pehn if you look them up online. Today, it's a peaceful and friendly country, although still poor and recovering from years of hardship.

Friday

In Cambodia, no one celebrates birthdays. Some older people don't even know their exact age. (My 13-year-old says that makes more sense than having a party every year for doing nothing other than continuing to exist.)

Funerals, on the other hand, are multi-day affairs that get very, very expensive. In a country where the average monthly salary is $100, the average funeral costs $9,000. Families pool together their life savings, and funeral attendees traditionally give the hosts a gift of money to offset the costs.

The most important holiday in Cambodia is Khmer New Year, which happens on April 13 after the rice harvest is over. It lasts for three full days. On the first day, they clean house and play traditional New Year games. 

We searched this list and played the most popular game, Leak Konsaeng. The kids described it as a Cambodian version of Duck, Duck, Goose.

A second important holiday is Cambodia is the water festival, which celebrates the retreat of floodwater from a large lake named Tonle Sap. 

We watched this video about the "floating villages" on Tonle Sap (although they aren't really floating, they're houses built on stilts):

On the first day of the water festival, there are illuminated boat parades and boat races with these ridiculously long boats that seat upwards of 70 people. On the second day, people give thanks to the moon and go to the temple at midnight to eat a rice dish called ambok.

We totally tried making it. My 9-year-old, who was still in a bad mood because she got yelled at for hitting her brother too hard during the New Year's game earlier (you're supposed to hit but it's supposed to be more of a playful tap than a concussion,) helped make it.

We didn't do the staying up until midnight part, though. We had the ambok for lunch. 

One thing we didn't get to, which we still might do because it looks fun, is making fish amok for dinner. Traditionally it's served in little banana leaf baskets, and I think the kids would have fun trying to make them with aluminum foil, but it ain't happening this week!

Lastly, here's a list of books about Cambodia or set in Cambodia that I left out for the kids to read as we studied the country:

• A Path of Stars by Anne Sibley O'Brien (picture book for K-3)
• The Secret of the Sacred Temple by Elizabeth Singer Hunt, book 5 from the Secret Agent Jack Stalwart series (for grades 1-4)
• Dara Palmer's Major Drama by Emma Shevah (fiction, for grade 3-7)
• Kradji: A Child of Cambodia (nonfiction, for grade 2-3)
• The Mysteries of Angkor Wat by Richard Sobol (nonfiction, grade 1-4)
• Jungle Adventures by Katy Lennon (nonfiction, grade 1-4)
• Khmer Empire: Ancient Civilization by Tami Deedrick (nonfiction, grade 4-6)
• A Voyage from Cambodia in 1975: Chantrea Conway's Story by Clare Pastore
• Dara's Clever Trap: A Story from Cambodia (folk tale easy reader, for grades 1-4)
• Khmers, Tigers, and Talismans (legends from Cambodia, written in both Cambodian and English)

Thanks for joining us for the sixth and final week of The Educational Summer Vacation 2021! We'll be back with more next year, if my kids have anything to say about it. 

For any complaining they do, they always seem eager to pick new countries the next summer and put more flags up on our wall.

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7 Quick Takes about Milestones at the Airport, Mostly Failing to Guess Who, and Being Forced into Retirement

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

—1—

This week we said goodbye to our furry new friend. We've been pet sitting for a friend's dog and they came home last night. 

You should've seen my 9-year-old calling from the driveway "I love you, Murphy! I love you!" and then running back to give him one last hug before we went home.

I'd better step up my game this week, because she's going to be so bored this. No Murphy, and her two older sisters are out of town visiting their cousins. 

This could be disastrous.

—2—

Sometimes you just run out of energy by 3 PM, and getting through the rest of the day is a genuine struggle. I had one of those days this week and was semi-comatose on the couch by 7, but my teens were leaving for the airport the next day and I needed to dispense a few words of advice and wisdom, like "do your laundry so you have clean clothes to pack."

I tried to summon them from where I lay but they couldn't hear me, so Phillip helped out by announcing, "Gather 'round, children, and listen to the dying words of your mother!"

I was so tired I almost had to give my advice Weekend at Bernie's style, but at least they did their laundry.

—3—

My teens have flown alone ever since they were 6 and 8, going to visit their grandparents in Minnesota nearly every summer. But this year they are 15 and 17, and they can fly like totally normal people instead of "unaccompanied minors."

No mounds of paperwork, no having to wear a name tag and a bracelet with a bar code, no flight attendants "carrying you around and stuff" (bonus points if you caught that reference.) No need for a parent to be there at all, really. You just drop them off at the curb and say "Have a good time!"

—4—

Bad news: they ruined Guess Who. My kids recently played the new version, which has gotten some updates since I owned it as a kid in the late 80s. 

Now there's more or less an equal number of men and women (I always wondered where all the babies came from in the Guess Who? universe, since there were only 6 women and some of them were old ladies.)

But other updates, while well-intentioned attempts to add diversity that reflects real life, don't seem to work in a children's yes-or-no guessing game. At least not from what I observed.

The racial diversity is on a spectrum, so if one kid asks, "Does your person have [insert a color] skin?" the odds are very high that they'll get a wrong answer or flip down the wrong person, because it's all relative.

Some of the characters now have streaks of funky colors in their hair. My son asked my daughter "Does your person have brown hair?" and she said yes, so he flipped down a person with brown and purple hair... who was the person he was supposed to guess.

This game is too hard and worst of all, there are NO rosy cheeks!!!

The best was when one of the kids asked "Does your person have a hat?" The response, after a long pause, was "I don't know... does a headscarf count as a hat?" Well, now we all know who you have so thanks, Guess Who!

—5—

I walked in on my 5-year-old the other day and asked "What are you doing?"

"Playing grownup," he answered, then took another sip of his coffee.

The plastic mug was full of water, I checked.

I guess I get the phone and computer, but no one in our house even drinks coffee so I'm not sure where he got that from.

—6—

Speaking of playing grownup, my youngest starts kindergarten in a week. I wasn't having any particular thoughts or feelings about that, and honestly believed I wasn't going to... until I got an email from playgroup.

Meetings are sporadic, but they're usually at a playground around 10 AM on a weekday, and it hit me like a ton of bricks that I am done with playgroup. Forever. Starting in September, for the first time in 17 years, I will have no reason to go.

I mean, we've been too busy to actually go to playgroup meetings for, like, the last 3 years. But we theoretically could.

I'm trying to be cool about this transition but I don't think it's working. Is it still being cool if you're making halfway-serious plans to kidnap a baby and take them to the park on the first day of school just so you can feel like you're not out of a job?

—7—

Overheard in a dispute between my 5-year-old and 13-year-old over a Nerf gun fight:

13yo: You're out! I shot you.

5yo: No, you didn't.

13: Yes, I did.

5: No, you didn't!

13: Yes, I did!

5: No, you didn't! I felt every single one not hit me!

And that is why you never argue with a 5-year-old.

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The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Fiji

This post contains affiliate links. If you click on them and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Email me if you know of any vacation homes in Fiji I could spend it on.

This post is part of a series on what I affectionately call The Educational Summer Vacation. I have six kids, ages 5 through 17, and every summer vacation we "travel" to different countries, learning about the history, the language, the customs, and the food! 

This week my 5-year-old picked Fiji off the map. Here's how it went!

Monday

There are over 300 islands in the archipelago of Fiji and over 1,500 species of sea life off the coasts. Most of its people live on the two main islands: Viti Levu and Vanua Levu.

We watched this intro to Fiji video and then found Fiji on the map. Usually our giant wall map is great for this, but I felt like it was kind of misleading to see Fiji down in the corner like it was just hanging out at the end of the world.

So we brought out a globe (we have this one) to find it, as well.

That's better.

Then we watched a short video on some Fijian myths and folk stories. Legend has it that the first people to sail to Fiji in their drua (sacred canoes) accidentally dropped a sacred relic called the Katonimana off the coast and it's still there to this day.

We looked up the flag of Fiji, which was probably a 6 out of 10 on the difficulty scale to copy. My kids all start complaining when they see a flag with a coat of arms, but at least this one was pretty straightforward.

Taped up on our Wall 'o Flags.

We looked up each item in the coat of arms and why it's important to Fiji. So what might be on our family coat of arms? I asked the kids to make one, but they were in a silly mood so most of them were about Cheetos.

I don't think we've had Cheetos for 6 months, at least, but clearly it made an impression on them.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a complete wash as far as The Educational Summer Vacation was concerned. 

A friend of ours went on vacation and, long story short, their dog's first 24 hours at the kennel went very badly and we went to make an emergency pickup. 

After getting Murphy home, bathing him (because stress-induced diarrhea is no joke,) and giving him lots of positive attention, the day was pretty much over. But the kids liked playing with Murphy way better than anything I would've planned having to do with Fiji so it turned out fine.

Wednesday

Fiji has three official languages: Fijian, Fiji Hindi, and English. Today we focused on the Fijian language. It's got a great sound to it, I kind of love it.

I had the kids take out pieces of paper and write down the Fijian alphabet as they listened to this 10-minute video. Ten minutes might sound like a long time, but my 7-year-old kept yelling, "He's going too fast!" 

That's because he was also explaining how Fijian uses letters from the Latin alphabet but pronounces some of them quite a bit differently. According to this website, that's because a missionary in the early 1800s matched Latin alphabet characters to their sounds but it didn't quite represent how Fijians conceptualized the sounds in their language so they tweaked it until it did.

We also counted from 1 to 10 and learned that "kerekere" means "please" in Fijian.

Then we took a minute to talk about the ocean. We read Coral Reef by Kate Scarborough to learn how a coral reef is formed. My 5-year-old had gotten bored and wandered off by this time, so I periodically yelled out a fun fact hoping it would get him curious enough to come back in.

"Did you know that a coral reef is made of animal skeletons?" I called. 

"Yes!" he answered, and kept doing whatever he was doing in the other room. (What a punk. He totally did not know that.)

The traditional Fijian canoe is called a "drua," meaning "double." I sort of described it to the kids but when I showed them a picture and they were all like "Oh, the boats in Moana." So maybe instead just say that. 

I planned to have the kids make their own drua, but we were all kind of hot and tired so I wasn't sure how into it they would be. I ended up making it a competition: one team would make a drua from materials they could find inside the house, and the other would make one from materials they could only find outside. 

Awarded Most Natural Recreation (right) and Most True to Its Fijian Roots (left.)

The outside drua turned out great. The kids used leaves, sticks, and bark from the yard, and lucky for them I'm terrible at lawn care so they had some nice blades of crabgrass to lash it all together. I loved how authentic it all was.

My favorite part of the drua made from inside materials was the attention to detail. They put a meke dancer on board (okay, hula, but it's close enough) and added a box to represent the Katonimana from the legends.

I wasn't planning on doing this, but the kids wanted to go put some water in the bathtub and see if they would float. 

I guessed that the sock forming the sail of the inside drua would soak up water and sink first, but actually both canoes stayed afloat until we got bored and declared it a tie.

Thursday

The indigenous people of Fiji were fierce Melanesian warriors. In fact, sailors avoided Fiji which had earned the nickname "Cannibal Island" for a reason. We read a few fun facts from this article and then tried to move on before the kids asked too many questions.

Meke was a popular way to pass down stories through song and dance. There are male and female mekes, and they look really different.

(As an activity, I asked the kids to plan and present a story-song to me. The topic could be anything they wanted. What they came up with was a retelling of the Star Wars story, go figure.)

What people might not know about Fijians is that a significant percentage of the population is Indo-Fijian. Yep, they're descended from people brought as indentured servants from India to work on the sugar cane plantations when Fiji was a British colony (1874-1970.)

That's why music like this Indo-Fijian bhajan, while probably not the first thing you think of when you think of the South Pacific Islands, is another style of traditional Fijian music. 

That night for dinner, we made a Fijian curry.  

Served over rice.

I chose curry because it just seemed a lot... safer than other traditional Fijian dishes like kokoda. Also called ceviche, you "cook" kokoda by soaking the fish in vinegar, which is another way of saying you don't actually cook it. 

I like to think I'm motivated to experience each culture we cover during The Educational Summer Vacation, but it turns out my motivation stops where the likelihood of getting Salmonella begins.

Friday

Today we talked about some of the plants and animals you might find in Fiji.

We looked up the collared lory, which is the national animal of Fiji. It's such a colorful, pretty bird you can't not color one of your own with this coloring page.

Fiji is also home to 1,500 kinds of sea life, so I got the kids a few books, including Starfish by Deborah Coldiron and Sea Turtle by Melissa Gish. We read the book about sea turtles, which symbolize good luck in the Islands.

One of our books about Fiji shows a picture of a man carving a wooden sea turtle, which gave me the idea to "carve" sea turtles of our own. I got out the playdough and some toothpicks, and three of the kids made their own sea turtles.

We then learned about mangrove trees, which are also called "walking trees" because their roots look so weird. They're actually pretty cool, as seen in this video. If the kids want to learn more, I also got them Mangroves by Beth Blaxland to read.

Tomorrow we're planning to make a Fijian dish called roro, and I'll update this post when we do to let you know how it went. Spoiler alert: I'm sure none of the kids will like it. I expect that it will be more of an experiment than a meal, but time will tell.

And that was our week in Fiji! It was a busy one doing everything from learning about animals to choreographing a dance to having a canoe-building contest. No wonder I'm so exhausted by the end of The Educational Summer Vacation.

One more week left...

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