The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Vanuatu

When my 12-year-old asked if we could start up The Educational Summer Vacation again, I said sure and asked him what countries he wanted to learn about. He picked Vanuatu, a country I've never heard of, so we both learned a lot this week! 

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Monday

Using our big wall map, the kids found the island country of Vanuatu. Normally, they would have filled out one of these cute little passport pages, but they said they didn't want to do that this year. If you're interested in downloading the passport pages for free, here's the link:

Download the Passport Pages

Vanuatu isn't just one island; it's actually 83 of them. The yellow Y-shaped line in the middle of the flag represents how the islands look on a map. They kind of are, if you squint.

The map also features to namele fern leaves in the tusk of a boar. In Vanuatu, pigs are a symbol of wealth. The curvier the tusk, the better.

We finished today by watching this overview video of Vanuatu. It was a good video, but man was it hard to find something that wasn't voiced by AI (you can tell that I didn't succeed.) The last time we did The Educational Summer Vacation two years ago, AI video wasn't a thing yet and YouTube looked completely different. Times have changed.

Tuesday

Did you know that Vanuatu has its own underwater post office? Yes, it's just a tourist thing but it is an actual post office, and if I went there on vacation I would probably mail an underwater postcard, too.

We also read this Barefoot Books interactive book for ages 8-10 about water and everything related to it, from the science of the water cycle to careers that work with water.

Then of course, we had to learn about the active volcano on Vanuatu, Mount Yasur. It's been erupting almost continuously for over 800 years! We watched this video about Mount Yasur, and then because the video mentioned a caldera we also watched this video to learn what a caldera is. 

We also watched this video to learn more about how islands are formed by volcanoes, and the kids figured out just why those 83 islands are in a Y-shape (and why volcanic islands like Hawaii are formed in chains) after all. 

Then it was time for the obligatory baking soda volcano in the sandbox. (My kids are getting older and this was the only time this summer they've even used the sandbox. It's so sad.)

If you don't know how to do a baking soda volcano, here's a tutorial.

A word about baking soda volcanoes: I almost didn't do this. I've done this activity in the past many times over the years with my 6 kids, I feel like it's almost always disappointing waste of time and baking soda. But this time it worked, and I think I can happily hang up my baking soda volcano hat and go out on a high note.

I gave the kids two books to read in their spare time:

• The Secret Explorers and the Smoking Volcano for ages 6-9 (this is the 6^th book in series, but as self-contained adventures you can read them out of order)
• Tsunami, a short, easy read about a family on vacation in Vanuatu when earthquakes and a volcanic eruption hit (4^th grade reading level)

Wednesday

Vanuatu is home to three interesting animals that I wanted to learn about with the kids today.

The first is the sugar glider. They are so cute. We read this book on sugar gliders from the library. It had some really good information but it was also written to teach you about taking care of your pet sugar glider and now my kids all know that is an option and want one. Oops.

An interesting bird called the megapode lives in Vanuatu. They bury their eggs in volcanic ash and let the earth incubate their eggs instead of sitting on them, which I thought was pretty cool. We watched this snippet of a nature documentary showing megapodes, but I should warn you that a lizard does eat one of their eggs at 1:45 if that's the kind of thing your kid is going to have nightmares about for a week.

I rarely laugh out loud at nature documentaries, but the editing after the lizard comes around is *chef's kiss* so I still recommend watching it after that point for the adults.

A third interesting animal only found on Vanuatu and other South Pacific islands is the coconut crab, also called the robber crab. It can't swim, climbs trees and eats coconuts, and is absolutely gigantic. It's the weirdest crab ever.

The video calls the coconut crab's huge size a "mystery," but that's not really true. It's a well-documented evolutionary fact that on isolated islands over millions of years, large animals shrink and small animals get bigger. It's called "island gigantism" and "island dwarfism," which we learned more about in this video. Not only do animals shrink or get bigger, they also tend to pick up new behaviors/diets or lose typical abilities for their species.

So I had my 10- and 12-year-olds each pick an animal, and show me what would happen to it on an isolated island over millions of years.

My 10-year-old drew a duck that grew huge, with a curved neck, sunglasses, and a hat:

This was actually reverse engineering; he already draws the hat-and-sunglasses duck all over everything.

My 12-year-old envisioned the mini-lion:

Both were very creative.

Thursday

The official language of Vanuatu is called Bislama. More than 95% of the words in Bislama are English-origin words, so listening to this video is kind of like a magic eye puzzle for your ears... if you just unfocus, you can sort of understand it.

This is called a Pidgin language, which I'd never really heard of before. When the island was colonized, many of the people were taken as indentured servants or slaves to plantations in Australia and Fiji, where they basically combined English words and Oceanic grammar.

The kids read and listened to a short story in Bislama and I asked them what they understood:

Then we played Simon Says, with a list of commands I generated with AI (but absolutely went and fact-checked because AI is a hallucinating liar sometimes.)

Here are the commands I used:

Jamap (JAHM-ahp) → jump up 

Sidaon (SEE-dah-own) → sit down

Stop (stohp) → stop

Stanap (STAHN-up) → stand up

Foldem han (FOLD-ehm hahn) → fold your arms

Taotsem nos (TOHT-sehm nohs) → touch your nose

Taotsem baksait (TOHT-sehm BAHK-sight) → touch your backside

Taotsem gras blong hed (TOHT-sehm grahs blohng hehd) → touch your hair ['grass belong head' is hair]

Tanem i go (TAHN-em ee go) → turn around

Putautem tang blong yu (POOT-owt-ehm tahng blohng yoo) → stick out your tongue

Klap (klahp) → clap

Smael (smile) → smile

Blokem ia blong yu (BLOHK-ehm YEE-ah blohng yoo) → plug your ears

Openem maus blong yu (OH-pehn-ehm MAH-oos blohng yoo) → open your mouth

Seksekem nos blong yu (sehk-SEHK-ehm nohs blohng yoo) → wiggle your nose

Honestly, I struggled to give these commands out loud to the kids because I kept getting "squaw get em firewood" vibes, like I was parodying someone.

But also, Bislama seems like a very sincere, straightforward, and sweet language (if you don't get this, read it out loud and you will:)

from Instagram

Friday

My kids love the Mr. History videos on YouTube, so they of course enjoyed this one on the history of Vanuatu.

Then we took a look at the currency in Vanuatu, which is called the Vatu:

I thought it was really interesting that the Vatu is the smallest (and only) unit. That would be like us measuring the value of everything in pennies.

The kids and I talked about watched the video a few more times to look at the money, and then I asked them to design their own money.

The 12-year-old created "the American Merican," a play on "the Vanuatu Vatu." All the denominations came in a different color, and their names were different combinations of letters from the phrase "United States of America."

 

My 10-year-old took a typically 10-year-old approach and made a scatalogically-based system of money. I don't even know if I should post this. He might see it and be encouraged by the attention.

Shifting gears, we decided to make a Vanuatu dish called simboro. (We used swiss chard instead of island cabbage, since we were fresh out of island cabbage.)

If your first thought is "that doesn't look like something Jenny's American 10- and 12-year-old would enjoy," you'd be right. I knew from the first moment I saw the recipe that they wouldn't like it, but I thought it would be a good learning experience and they might have fun rolling up the leaves.

They sort of did.

With every country that we study, I always say that I learned a lot. But this time I really learned a lot, because I didn't even know Vanuatu existed. There was one area that I left out, though, and that was the cultural rite of passage of land diving. I screened a video and decided against mentioning it to my kids because (1) I was squirming in physical pain just watching it, and (2) I didn't want to give my boys any ideas.

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