South American Adventure

Our homeschool curriculum took us to South America, specifically Brazil. Olivia really loves identifying places on the map and "traveling" different ways to these countries--air, land, sea. As she enters the country, we put a flag sticker with the date in her passport.

Olivia and I tired to learn some samba dancing. Daddy taught her some about soccer. And, again we use you tube to listen to Portuguese language and attempt to learn some. There are all kinds of good resources there (just don't try to search for them with your child standing right with you. ;) )

Here is some of her art projects as we spent time in Brazil:

carnival dancer hat

dancer

drinking straw flutes

chimes (we were discussing how silver is mined in South America)

rain stick (postal tube, about 150 nails, beans and paint)

We spent a lot of time reading and learning about the tropical rain forest and the Amazon river. This involved tons of library books. Olivia loved reading about all the different animals and plants. At the end of our 3 weeks, she made a lapbook to remember some of what was learned. It came from homeschool share.

this is her front and back (i guess you call that a deconstructed rain forest of sorts... :) )

this is a little hard to see but it is like a diorama but in minibook form

We also had a food day. We had rainforest sandwiches, that involved mixing banana, coconut, cinnamon and raisins into a normal peanut butter sandwich. We had rain forest "icecream". It was avocado mixed with frozen cool whip and a bit of powder sugar, making it very green. And then of course, we are all grateful for the chocolate we have from the rain forest right? So we made these Brazilian chocolate caramel balls rolled in chocolate sprinkles. :)

Our read alouds were the biography of Nate Saint. He was an Ecuadorian jungle pilot. His story is just amazing and inspiring. I highly encourage you to read it. We also read Erth's Birthday. This was a story of a very grumpy porcupine (yes, they live in forests but not so much tropical rainforests, i know) who ends up taking care of some fox kits after their mother is killed. It is a funny and good story overall. It teaches a lot about animal behavior, for instance a porcupine is an herbivore, loving salt and tree bark, while the foxes are carnivores. This creates some interesting challenges for this porcupine. As I said, he is very grumpy and there is also a "bad guy" animal (a fisher) so I would suggest that you preview the book before reading it aloud. Nonetheless, we did enjoy it.

And now we are packing up to head home and then to Europe for a while. See ya soon!