The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Colombia

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The summer marks the 11th year of The Educational Summer Vacation in our family; we put up the giant wall map, the kids choose different countries, and we spend a week learning about each one. 

If we haven't met yet, I'm Jenny Evans and I take this journey every summer with my six kids, ages 6 through 18.

This week you're welcome to come along with us to Colombia! Borrow, beg, or steal whatever you like from this post to do at home with your own kids... we don't mind.

Monday

The first thing we do every week is find the country on our wall map and examine it. The kids filled out a passport page about Colombia, looking at the map and writing down its location, bordering countries, and capital city.

I didn't line them up in height order like the von Trapps, it just happened.

While they filled out their passports, I read Colombia Treasure Quest from the Tiny Travelers series. Don't be fooled by the cardboard pages: it's not a baby book! It's actually a great activity book and intro to Colombia for kids of any age. 

The colorful illustrations remind me of a certain Disney movie set in Colombia that rhymes with "Enschmantro."

Then the kids looked up the flag of Colombia and drew it on paper to add to our wall. 

At the end of the summer, we take them down but keep them and put them all back up the next summer; we've been doing this since 2011 so we've amassed a ridiculously large collection.

We do a little family religious devotional on Monday nights called Family Home Evening and we always have a treat at the end (the kids insist), so that night our treat was Colombian rice pudding, made with a recipe from the book We Visit Colombia.

Bad lighting; good pudding.

If you make rice pudding, be aware that you need to make it in the morning and chill for at least a few hours before serving it.

For a bedtime story that night, we read A Thousand White Butterflies by Jessica Betancourt-Perez. It's a really cute picture book that also incorporates simple Spanish phrases into a story about a Colombian immigrant making her first new friend in the U.S.

Tuesday

The Caño Cristales river is also called "the liquid rainbow" or "the river of 5 colors." But you can only see the colors for a few months of the year, if the water and light conditions are right.

We read about the that make it appear so colorful in this article and then watched a vlog about a photographer who visited Caño Cristales to make a time lapse video of it. 

(I usually can't stand travel vlogs because of the "I just love taking slo-mo videos of myself wearing cute traveling outfits" vibe, but this is not like that.)

And then of course, we had to go watch the finished South America time lapse video that this behind-the-scenes video was about. It was amazing.

Next natural wonder of Colombia: Taryrona National Park. It's the best place in the world to see monkeys, especially howler monkeys, capuchins, and cotton-top tamarins. Cotton-top tamarins are endangered, and in fact the only place they still live in the wild (not in zoos) is in Colombia.

The last natural wonder we explored is called el Peñon de Guatapé, a giant boulder 7,500 feet tall. We watched this video and this one about el Peñon de Guatapé, which people can climb using the 708 steps built into the side for a great view.

The surrounding town of Guatapé is also very colorful and beautiful, as shown in the pictures in this article.

As an activity, I gave the kids two options. They could either:

1. Make a postcard of Guatapé OR the Caño Cristales river
2. Write an illustrated guide called "How to Be a Cotton-Topped Tamarin" 

I thought everyone would pick the postcard option, but I was surprised that 3 of them wanted to make the how-to guide.

My 16-year-old made a little booklet filled with hilarious sketches:

I provided the 6- and 8-year-olds with a template like this one and showed them how to do a Google search for cotton-topped tamarin facts. The 6-year-old needed help writing his, so we sat together and I asked him questions to help him figure out what to write.

My 8-year-old took it and ran, and when he showed me his finished guide I was laughing so hard at his adorable illustrations:

Tamarin love.

He read that monkeys will often "present their rears" to rival troops of primates to defend their territory, resulting in the most hilarious picture that's ever been drawn in this house.

My 14-year-old, who wasn't that into this activity, chose to make a postcard of someone being yeeted off the rock of Guatapé.

Boys will be boys.

He's under no illusions about what happens to crafts like this after we're done doing them.

My 10-year-old decided to make a Google docs postcard addressed to her doll, Dolly.

That night, we read the picture book Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia by Jeanette Winter. It's the story of Luis Soriano, a man in rural Colombia who started a traveling library in 1997 to bring books to kids in rural Colombia with his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto.

Wednesday

Cumbia is the national dance of Colombia, and I'm kind of glad that my teenagers were all out of the house this afternoon, because I've heard that after a certain age it's not cool to dance with your mom anymore or something.

We watched this instructional video to learn basic cumbia steps, and I loved that they do it in both English and Spanish. It's not the easiest to follow if you've never danced before, but I used to swing dance in my life B.C. (before children) and it's very similar, so I was able to help everybody follow along. 

After practicing with each kid, we played some cumbia music and tried it out. Later that day, my 6-year-old even approached me and said, "Can we do the dance again?" (He's pretty good, although a little short for spinning me around.)

As a bedtime story, we read Waiting for the Biblioburro by Monica Brown. It's another story about the traveling donkey library like last night, but less biographical and more about the wonder of books.

Thursday

Colombia has lots of exports: coffee, flowers, and unfortunately, drugs. 

First, let's get the bad part out of the way. Colombia is recovering from a 50-year civil war that made for some really hard times in the country. 

Colombia is unfortunately informally known as the drug cartel capital of the world. It stems from the 1960s when guerilla groups like FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) started fighting the government, and funded their activities by exporting illegal drugs. Other paramilitary groups opposed FARC, but they only made things worse for the average Colombian. This is a really heavy subject for kids, but to help introduce it we read the book A Refugee's Journey from Colombia by Linda Barghoorn. It does a fantastic job at explaining the conflict in kid-friendly terms and doesn't take long to read.

With that out of the way, we moved to a few less controversial things. Colombian coffee, for example, is famous all over the world. Although my family and I don't drink coffee, I thought it would be really interesting to find out how it grows so we watched this video and I was surprised to realize the brown beans I see in the grocery store aren't how coffee starts. I had no idea.

Flowers are another big export of Colombia. In fact, in the town of Medellín, Colombia there's a famous flower festival that happens every year. Flower growers decorate these giant boards called sillaterras with colorful flower arrangements (some in the shapes of pictures or words) and strap them to their backs to parade down the street. 

We watched this video about making a sillatera and then tried it out ourselves.

Each kid got cardboard from the recycling and went outside to collect flowers (being mid-July, it's not the best time for flowers so they were allowed to use any natural materials like grass and leaves.) They arranged everything on their cardboard and hot glued it on. 

My 8-year-old made a smiley face:

My 10-year-old made a pretty arrangement in the shape of a heart:

I told the kids they got bonus points if the sillateras were wearable, so my 6-year-old wanted to attach a string. He explained to me but then stopped as he searched for the right word: "I want the string to go across my forehead so it can be more..."

"Authentic?"

"No," he said. "More like it's supposed to be."

The 14-year-old made more of a modern art sort of sillatera, which I thought was cool:

Friday

I've been learning Spanish for the past several months and the younger kids have been begging me daily to teach them Spanish words, but one of the basics we haven't covered yet is las partes del cuerpo, the parts of the body. Since Colombia is a Spanish-speaking country, this was a perfect day for them to learn.

We watched this video a few times (even I learned some new vocabulary words), and then played a game. If your kids are younger you can just call out "la nariz!" and have them touch their noses, for example, but if they're older you could play Simon Says but do it all in Spanish: "Simón dice tocar _________" (Simon says touch _________).

We followed along with this Spanish version of Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. My older kids buried their heads under the sofa cushions and wished for a meteor to strike the earth, but my younger kids seemed to enjoy it.

The last thing we wanted to cover today was the national sport of Columbia, tejo. It's like cornhole, but with explosives. Instead of aiming for a hole in the middle of the board, you're aiming for the packets of gunpowder in the center. You earn points for getting near them or hitting them (and making them blow up.) Here's a visual.

Had I known, I'd have picked up some extra firecrackers on the 4th of July and saved them for this week, but I don't plan that far in advance so maybe we'll do it next year. We attempted it with a homemade gunpowder recipe, but it didn't work. I don't know the details because explosives are my husband's department, not mine.

As a bedtime story, we read Digging for Words by Angela Burke Kunkel. It's a true story about a Colombian garbage collector who started saving books from the trash and created the first library in his neighborhood in Bogotá.

Saturday

On Saturday for dinner, we had ajiaco soup. It's an easy soup to make (with one ingredient I had to buy off of Amazon ahead of time.)

My 10-year-old even found avocados marked with a "product of Colombia" sticker. Unfortunately, I have a chronic problem with judging the ripeness of avocados and by the time Saturday came around, most of them were overripe to the point of being unusable. 

Oh, well. We were able to salvage a little bit.

Then we watched Encanto, which I knew was set in Colombia but watching it a second time after doing this week I realized there were a lot of little things we hadn't picked up on. The kids kept yelling out, "Hey, there's the river! There's the flowers! There's tejo! There's the soup!" Almost everything we covered this week was in the movie, in one form or another.

We had a really fun week in Colombia. We broadened our horizons, learned some new words in Spanish, ate some different food, and read a lot. The failed tejo experiment was disappointing for the kids (especially the ones that spent all that time grinding up the gunpowder ingredients with their dad) but they're all holding me to my promise of buying extra firecrackers next 4th of July and trying again.

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7 Quick Takes about Fuzzy Friends, Packing at the Last Minute, and Adventures in Tie Dye

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

—1—

Who else toured an alpaca farm over the weekend? This place has been on my radar for a while but we just haven't gotten around to booking a tour, but we finally made it happen.

The tour guide took us right inside the alpaca pen and we got to pet them. They are so soft. Unfortunately, alpacas don't really enjoy being petted, they just tolerate it briefly until they walk away. 

Although they do like it when you give them treats.

Alpacas are the most bizarre-looking animals up close. Their necks are so pencil-thin and flexible, it looks like you put the head of a mammal on a snake. And the ridiculous haircuts they get don't help.

I informally named this one "Señor Muttonchops."

They also had a baby alpaca at the farm, about three months old. It was simultaneously cute and unnerving how skinny and spindly it was.

My 16-year-old came home with a stuffed animal alpaca made with alpaca wool from the gift shop, polled her friends, and named him Linus.

—2—

This week is youth camp week at church for my teenagers. For the first half of the week, the girls from our congregation and a number of surrounding congregations went to a rustic camp and spent several days doing archery, rifles, sunrise kayaking, making bracelets, staying up WAY too late, doing skits and silly camp songs, reading their scriptures, and meeting for spiritual devotionals.

My 10-year-old, who will be old enough to go to camp next year, wouldn't stop grilling them when they got home and can't stop talking about it now.

—3—

The girls were at the camp for the first part of the week, and they traded places with the boys halfway through the week. They're not back yet so I have no idea how it went. Hopefully fine.

The boys' packing list was prefaced by the specific reminder that there was to be "absolutely no climbing on roofs" so that's reassuring. 

It hadn't been necessary to say that on the girls' packing list.

—4—

The night before he left for camp, my son had a busy day and was super-tired so I told him to wash his clothes and he could pack in the morning before he left.

I meant that he should pack first thing in the morning when he woke up, but he took it to mean "10 minutes before leaving." I guess I should've been more specific.

His clothes were still wet, because the heat in the dryer had gone out,  and they were just tumbling around in cool air for a while when he ran the dryer the night before. We quickly grabbed out a few things and hung them in front of a box fan to get them at least mostly dry, threw them in a suitcase, and he was off to camp.

Best case scenario, he will have remembered my extremely-patient-and-not-angry-at-all advice to hang the clothes up when he gets to camp to dry the rest of the way. Worst case scenario, he'll forget and be stuck wearing smelly clothes for three days and learn from experience not to leave packing until the last possible second next time. 

Either way, it works out, I guess.

—5—

For weeks, my 6-year-old's swim teacher has been trying to get him to swim in the deep end, but we might as well be asking him to walk over a bed of hot coals. He flatly refuses to go anywhere he can't touch the bottom, and no force on earth could convince him to do otherwise.

But at his last lesson, his older siblings came along and were messing around on the other side of the pool, and that changed everything. 

The 6-year-old got curious and wandered over to watch them after his lesson, and by the time we left he was literally diving headfirst through a floatie tube in the deep end and telling me how fun it was.

And that's the power of older siblings. I really enjoy having kids in a variety of ages and stages, because they're all uniquely positioned to help each other in ways that I just can't, and I think that's a beautiful thing.

—6—

My 10-year-old recently tie-dyed a shirt at a church activity, and she wanted to make an extra for her 8-year-old brother. (She probably just wanted to make a second one, but she explained to me it was because the 6-year-old has a tie-dyed shirt already and now that she made one for herself she didn't want the 8-year-old to feel left out.)

My 8-year-old loves his new shirt because "it looks like an explosion in space."

Unfortunately, they'd run out of gloves by the time she decided she wanted to make a second shirt so she just did it with her bare hands, and came home looking like Veruca Salt up to her wrists. In retrospect, I wish I'd gotten a picture but I was too busy shoving her toward the bathroom sink, terrified she would touch anything in the house and ruin it forever.

—7—

In other news that's not really news, I've killed some more plants. I often remind myself of this meme I once saw of a smiling lady buying plants at a nursery, with an added speech bubble that says "Hey baby, want to come back to my place and die?"

This time, I acquired some free cilantro seeds and decided to try planting them didn't get my hopes up. When I started to see some little green sprouts in the dirt I was thrilled: I'd done it! The next day, though, they withered up and basically disappeared. Maybe I didn't water them enough, maybe I should have brought them inside. Maybe it was too hot, or too sunny, or not hot and sunny enough. Who knows. 

I still have some more seeds, so I think I'll try again but indoors. I'm always encouraged by my friend Valerie. I always think of as an amazing plant lady, but when I mentioned to her once how I can't grow anything she immediately empathized "Oh yeah, I kill so many plants. I just don't know when to quit, though." So maybe that's the secret.

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The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Zimbabwe

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something, I may receive a commission for referring you.

The Educational Summer Vacation is all about giving my kids and I some structure during those long summer days. 

Since 2011, my six kids (ages 6-18) and I have been learning about different countries in the world every summer. The little kids love quizzing each other on the flags we've hung up on the wall, and the teenagers say their heads are now full of random facts about faraway places that come in handy at unexpected moments.

This week, we learned all about Zimbabwe! If you homeschool or are just looking for a fun craft, recipe, or activity to do with your kids for an afternoon, please use anything you like that you see here.

Monday

I {heart} YouTube; we watch so many educational videos on there. This beautiful 4K intro to Zimbabwe had my kids spellbound. Me too, if I'm honest.

First, we located Zimbabwe (which until 1979 was part of a country called Rhodesia after British colonialist Cecil Rhodes) on our big wall map. 

I printed out a bunch of these blank passport pages for each kid, hole-punched the corner, and hold them together with a binder ring. We fill one out for every country we "visit," and the kids always like designing their own visa stamp in the little blank area.

Printable blank pages are here

After reading Count Your Way through Zimbabwe, the kids looked up the flag of Zimbabwe and copied it down on paper to color and add to our wall of flags. 

They also looked up the symbolism of the flag: green is for agriculture, yellow is for minerals, red is for the blood shed during the war for liberation, and black is for the black majority of the population. The white triangle represents peace and the red star symbolizes the country's aspirations. The bird is the national emblem, found in ancient Zimbabwean ruins we'll talk about later this week.

Tuesday

After reading a little bit from the book Zimbabwe from the Exploring World Cultures series, we focused in today on Zimbabwe's language.

Zimbabwe has 16 official languages. Most official government business is in English, but the most widely-spoken language at home is Shona. Since we already know English pretty well, we turned our attention to Shona.

We watched a TikTok on counting to ten in Shona a few times, and then practiced by playing number bingo. 

You could print out some cards here, but it was faster to have my kids make their own so that's what we did.

The caller draws a number card, says its name in Shona, and then everyone works out which number it is (teamwork is allowed) so they can put a candy on it. The game ends when all the M&Ms are eaten or when the youngest player runs away screaming because he didn't get a bingo, whichever comes first. It'll probably be the running away screaming one.

So maybe the 6-year-old didn't have a great time playing bingo, but he really did enjoy a cute picture book called Party Croc, which is adapted from a Shona folktale, which made up for it.

For dinner that night, we had nyama (Zimbabwean beef stew) with sadza (thick cornmeal porridge). I knew the kids would like the nyama and hate the sadza, but told them they had to try at least a bite of everything.

I was right about both things. 

Wednesday

Where Are You Going Manyoni? is a beautifully illustrated picture book that was a perfect introduction to today's topic: the natural wonders of Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe is home to Victoria Falls, which isn't really even a waterfall but an insanely wide sheet of falling water. It's known to locals as "the smoke that thunders" because of the mist that floats up from the bottom. 

We watched this compilation of 4K shots of the falls and then stumbled across this 360° video. Have you ever seen one of these? You can move around within the video like virtual reality, it's pretty crazy.

Zimbabwe is also a popular safari spot, home to the "Big 5" animals people want to see on a safari: African lions, African leopards, African elephants, Cape buffalo, and rhinos. 

I cut up a list of 10 facts about the Big 5 and asked my teenager to hide them around the room, then sent the little kids on a safari to find them and read each one aloud.

Then we went nature watching in our yard, taking turns with a binoculars and a magnifying glass to see what wildlife we could find. 

We checked our birdhouse (plenty of fresh nesting material so we know there were some chicks there in the spring), filled up our bird feeder, and each kid got a copy of a printout of common birds in our state in case they saw anything.

We didn't see many birds just then, but after we were done I taped the bird identification sheet to the sliding glass door by the feeder and my 8-year-old correctly identified his first bird by the next morning.

Thursday

Right now, $1 USD equals around $361 Zimbabwean dollars. The country's annual inflation is at a staggering 190% (up from 66% before the Russia-Ukraine war), and that's still better than it was during the unbelievable hyper-inflation of 2008. (By contrast, inflation in the US is usually around 2%, though because of the upheaval of the last year it's gone up to 9%.) 

I admit the video was a little over my younger kids' heads, but it was a great place to start. I adapted this candy bar inflation activity to have a basic economics lesson, using Hershey Kisses.

I asked "what is money?" and was pleased none of the kids mentioned bills or coins. Money can be anything we agree to trade for other stuff: shells, jewels, etc. For the purposes of our demonstration, our money was going to be dried beans.

I gave each kid six beans and we bid on Hershey's Kisses for three rounds. I gave them three more pie weights each round, so by the end they were going for a little more than they were at the beginning, but not much.

Then I asked "what is inflation?" My 6-year-old knew inflation was blowing up a balloon, and that was a good place to start. Inflation means the balloon gets bigger, and when you're talking about money, inflation means you need a bigger amount of money to buy something than you needed a little while ago. A little bit of inflation is okay, but when a government keeps printing money like Zimbabwe's did in 2008, you get runaway inflation.

We did three more rounds of bidding, but each time I kept throwing in larger and larger amounts beans, until each Hershey Kiss cost 10x more than it had in the beginning, even though it was the same Hershey Kiss.

Regardless of how much they understood, everyone enjoyed all the chocolate.

That night, the teenagers and Phillip and I watched the first half of the documentary President, about the 2018 election against a corrupt dictator who'd been in power for 40 years. Unfortunately it was late for us old people, and we'll have to finish the rest soon!

Friday

Today you can visit stone ruins there of a walled city called Great Zimbabwe, which was once a major stop on a trade route in the 11th century.

We learned about it from the DVD Ancient Africa from the Arizona Smith series. Basically Arizona Smith is the Bill Nye of archaeology (Arizona Smith = Indiana Jones, get it? Womp, womp.) 

The stone structures of Great Zimbabwe were all built without mortar. There were no right angles — everything was round — and each precisely cut stone was a little recessed from the ones below it for extra stability. 

The younger kids took out our giant building blocks (best Christmas gift ever) and did their best to recreate Great Zimbabwe:

It looks like his structure is smoking and possibly on fire, but I think there was just water on my camera lens.

In Great Zimbabwe, there are also eight sculptures of birds carved from soapstone (you can see one on the country's flag).

Using a bar of soap and a handful of implements like butter knives, pencils, paperclips, and toothpicks, the kids tried out carving the Great Zimbabwe birds for themselves:

The younger kids preferred to sketch their designs on paper first and then trace them onto the bar of soap:

The 6-year-old accidentally broke off the beak, but he worked with it and didn't run away screaming, which was progress.

The finished products:

The older kids were groaning because we were carving the soapstone birds out of soap, and the soap was Ivory just like they traded ivory out of Great Zimbabwe... between that and Arizona Smith, I guess it was a really punny day.

To end the day, we read a nice picture book that was a true story about the value of education called The Girl Who Buried Her Dreams in a Can, and that was the end of our week in Zimbabwe.

We learned a lot this week, from Shona to sculpting to economics. Visiting Zimbabwe was a lot of fun, although if you asked the younger kids about it they'd probably cite playing with all the soap scraps from their bird carvings in a big bucket of water outside afterward was the funnest part of the whole thing. 

It certainly was the messiest.

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7 Quick Takes about Summer Swim Meets, Seeing Some Light at the End of the Basement Tunnel, and How to Make Watching Cartoons Educational

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

—1—

As I sat down to write this week's 7 Quick Takes, it took me a good five minutes before I could put down a single word. What in the world did I do this week? I couldn't remember. 

It reminds me of this meme from one of my favorite mom bloggers, Meredith at Perfection Pending, who sums up the condition of the stay-at-home-mom so well:

My days are a blur of feeding little people, driving little people, taking care of little people, and cleaning up after little people. Most of which I love and feel really lucky to be able to do; it just isn't very interesting to talk about.

—2—

How do you handle screen time in your house? Our 18- and 16-year-olds do a decent job at managing their own screen time, but I'm struggling with the younger ones. 

I get so tired of managing their screen time (and enforcing sanctions when they break the house rules about screen time), so banishing screens from the house seems like the obvious solution.

But it's complicated with my 10- and 14-year-olds. Kids these days live online, so taking away screens means cutting them off from their friends (especially one of my kids, whose buddies seem to do little else besides meet up online to either play Minecraft or talk about it.) I also like some of the coding and math activities they do online.

I just wish I could figure out how to get them to enjoy those benefits in moderation. But it seems like our two choices are: go screen-free and my kids don't get to participate in friendships, or they use screens to the point where they forget to blink and I turn into the Incredible Hulk. 

Has anyone else found a happy middle ground?

—3—

My 10- and 14-year-olds are on a summer swim team. Our family isn't that serious about swimming, but a friend asked if we wanted to carpool and it was a pretty cheap way to get the kids tons of practice swimming for the summer, so we signed up even though we didn't really know what we were getting into.

Our first meet was this past Saturday at 7 AM.

"7 o'clock? In the morning? On a Saturday? Are the roads even open that early??" Phillip asked in horror.

I told him I didn't know. 

The meet went okay. It was a learning curve for all of us, because there's a whole swim meet culture we didn't know about. My kids came in last most of the time, but they worked hard and my 10-year-old even won one of her races and got a rubber ducky she named Norbert. 

Norbert the reading duck.

—4—

My 14-year-old has been trying to get a job for a while now. He applied at one place that took forver to get him in for an interview, and then there was a whole debacle about getting his minor work permit that took an extra week, but he finally has a job now!

The store he's working at has a really picky dress code, so the first thing we had to do was buy him $50 of work clothes/shoes, none of which will probably fit him in 3 months because he's growing so fast. This job just may end up costing us more money than he earns.

—5—

We're getting closer to a finished basement! I know I've been saying that for years, but there are a lot of steps involved in taking a space from concrete cell to a comfortable living area. 

Phillip is finishing up the electrical, and reportedly might even be really to start calling drywallers this weekend. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, but I'm really excited.

We do basically all of our own home improvement, so when we hire professionals to do something it feels like magic. Having a crew of trained professionals swarm in and get the job done in one day is at least one billion times faster than having one lone person work on it in bits and pieces after a long day at work while juggling family life and also dealing with broken dishwashers and other crises around the house.

—6—

The kids have recently fallen in love with going on bike rides. In order to get to a good neighborhood for biking, they do have to bike a short way down a halfway-busy street, so I hadn't yet given permission to the 6- and 8-year-olds to go there. 

This week I decided it was time to bike the route a few times with them to teach them all the safety rules and make sure they know how to do it, and now they go out on their own multiple times a day. They always come back with sweaty heads and smiles on their faces, saying "That was fun!"

Of course, they picked the hottest week of 2022 to become avid bikers, but they're addicted now and it's good to see them say "I'm bored, let's go on a bike ride" instead of reaching for the tablet.

—7—

I discovered that all the content on Disney+ is available to watch dubbed in Spanish, and it's really helping with my Spanish comprehension. (Still not very good, but it's less bad than it used to be!) 

You can set up multiple user profiles within your account, so my 16-year-old set one up for me with Spanish as the default language and Mirabel from Encanto as my profile picture.

I've been watching some movies, but they also have a lot of TV shows. Kids' shows in particular are great because the characters use shorter, simpler sentences I can understand. So if we happen to be talking and I slip the word 'ornitorrinco' (platypus) into the conversation, know it's because I was probably watching Phineas y Ferb that morning.

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