Since 2012, my kids and I have been learning about countries of the world
during summer vacation. You can read about how it started here
(at the time, I thought we were doing it for just that one summer) or you can
follow along and study Malaysia with us!
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While the kids found Malaysia on the
big wall map, I told them a little bit about the country. Thirty-two million people live
in Malaysia, and it's actually two separate land masses: Peninsular Malaysia
and Eastern Malaysia on the island of Borneo.
In the past, the kids also would've filled out
the passport pages
I made for them but they didn't want to this time. At ages 10 and 12,
they've almost outgrown doing The Educational Summer Vacation so I'm not
going to push it.
If you're from the U.S., the flag of Malaysia is going to look a little
familiar. They didn't copy us, though. It's inspired by the flag design of the East
India Company, which also looks suspiciously like the U.S. flag. So maybe
we copied the idea?
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The 14 stripes and the 14 points of the star represent each of
the 13 states and the national government. The blue is for the Malay
people, the yellow is for the Malay rulers, the star is for unity and
the cresent is for Islam.
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As we were reading the story I recognized the picture of the rambutan and
said, "Hey! I've seen those at the grocery store!" So the next time I went
shopping I picked some up.
In Northern Malaysia, there's a place called Eagle Square.
This site
has a virtual tour, but be aware that your kids will 100% get frustrated
that they can't move around in it like a video game, they can just look
around.
Click to Share:
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| Not super-ripe... but this is New England, not Southeast Asia. I'm okay with it. |
They came with instructions on how to eat them, which I appreciated. First,
you saw through the thick spiky/hairy red skin. Inside, there's a
squishy oval about the size of an eyeball. You squeeze it out of the skin,
pop it into your mouth, and then spit out the pit inside.
I thought the fruit tasted like a grape, only milder.
My husband loved rambutan and wants to buy them every week, the 12-year-old
couldn't get past the freaky appearance to even try one. Everyone else was
in the middle.
Tuesday
One of the most iconic landmarks in Malaysia is the Petronas Towers in the capital, Kuala Lumpur. It's twin towers connected by a
skybridge, and they were once that tallest buildings in the world.
My 12-year-old is really into architecture right now, so we watched
this video
on the engineering of the Petronas Towers and then I asked him to
use his hand-me-down set of fancy
architecture Legos to build a replica.
He said he only had enough pieces for one, and we could just imagine the
other one and the skybridge.
Just north of Kuala Lumpur is
Batu Caves, a series of limestone caves that was developed into a Hindu shrine
in the 1890s.
There's a giant gold statue of Lord Murugan (the Hindu god of war,
victory, and wisdom) and 272 rainbow steps to climb in order to reach
the cave.
(My 10-year-old was especially impressed with this drone flyover video of the caves, when the drone zips through the little window on
top of one of the buildings.)
Near Pengang (also north of Kuala Lumpur) is a place called George Town.
George Town is a popular tourist destination not only for of the
architecture, but also for the street art you can see everywhere.
We checked out some examples in
this blog post, where the artist puts a real bike or swing or chair in front of a wall
and then paints something on the wall to complement it. I asked my kids to
creatively combine a drawing and a 3D object, and this is what my
10-year-old came up with:
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| Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from Ice Age. |
Wednesday
The half of Malaysia that is in Borneo is about 60% rainforest and is
famous for outdoor adventure and incredible wildlife.
For example, there are 238 species of birds in Borneo! I knew my
12-year-old would be interested in that. He's gone crazy with the Merlin
app and now when we're out and about, he'll hear a distant bird call,
incline his ear, and announce to us all, "That's a rose-breasted
grosbeak." He's an old soul.
We read about a refuge in Borneo that rehabilitates and releases
orphaned orangutans in the book How to Babysit an Orangutan and then I also gave the kids Adventures of Riley: Operation Orangutan to read on their own time. Another one, which I don't think they
read but they theoretically could have, was Undaunted: The Wild Life of Birute Mary Galdikas and Her Fearless
Quest to Save Orangutans.
Another interesting animal to see in Borneo is the proboscis monkey, and the kids really appreciated the sound effects in this video:
In Borneo's rainforests you might also glimpse the
rafflesia flower, which is called the "corpse flower" because it stinks like rotten
meat! The kids remembered it from when we studied Indonesia, though, so we didn't spend too much time on it.
For lunch, we had the national dish of Malaysia, nasi lemak. It's essentially Southeast Asian charcuterie, and therefore super
simple to make. Especially because I cheated and used frozen chicken tenders to
substitute for Malay fried chicken.
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| Not authentic but we tried. |
Nasi lemak starts with coconut rice served in the center of the plate in a dome,
surrounded with cucumber slices, hardboiled eggs, and peanuts. One of
mine is allergic to peanuts so he had almonds. And in place of spicy
sambal, which is time-consuming and my kids wouldn't eat it anyway, we
made a fake substitute out of sauteed onions, ketchup, soy sauce, and
brown sugar. Malaysian grandmas, don't come for me. I did what
I had to do.
Thursday
Islam is the national religion of Malaysia, so I grabbed At the Mosque (Worship With Me)
and
Muslim Mosque from the library, and had the 10- and 12-year-old pick one to read
and report to me on what they learned.
We watched some footage of the National Mosque,
Masjid Negara, and the famous
Pink Putra Mosque. They were recognizing the features they learned about in the books,
although it was unclear to us where the minaret was on the National
Mosque.
Of course, there's obviously religious diversity in Malaysia, since
yesterday we learned about the giant Hundu shrine at Batu Cave.
So we also looked at Kek Lok Si, the largest Buddhist temple in
Malaysia:
The kids didn't know very much about Buddhism so we watched this
5-minute
intro to Buddhism
video. I would describe the style of this video as "drinking from the
firehose." They paused it multiple times to ask questions, including
"wait a minute... so no one knows if Nirvana is actually a thing because
once you find out, you're dead?" It was a big day with lots of thoughts.
After the video, we took out their Keva planks
(I love these things) and I challenged them to build either a mosque
or a Buddhist temple. They chose to work together and build a temple.
Friday
Malay is considered a relatively easy language for English-speakers to
learn. There are no tones, no conjugations, no verb tenses, no articles, no
noun genders, and it's written in the Latin alphabet we already know.
I told the kids about a few fun features, like how you repeat a word to
pluralize it ('child' is 'budak' but 'children' is 'budak-budak') and then
we watched a video teaching 30 common Malay words and phrases until they got bored.
I usually try to plan a fun activity based around the language, but I
was running out of steam at this point in the summer and I knew that my
brother- and sister-in-law who both
served religious missions
in Malaysia were coming to visit us in a few weeks, so I figured that the
kids could ask them some questions then and called it good.
This summer is going by so fast, but I'm glad I could make the most of it
by planning a fun week for my kids learning about Malaysia.
I love it when their interests (like the birding and the building) intersect
with the things we learn, and hopefully connecting the different countries
with their interests will help them remember for longer. And at the very
least, if they don't, then I still will.
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