This school year we are doing an Around the World study. I am not using any curriculum, I am creating my own, so I have been planning it out for months and have been itching to start. It has been a blast so far!
I have chosen a few countries to study on each continent (except Antarctica) and have chosen a few topics for each country to dive into. We have been spending a week studying each country. I plan on doing a blog post after we finish each continent to share activities we did, books we read, and links.
This week we wrapped up the continent of Asia after learning about China, India, and Thailand.
China was our first stop! To introduce it, we first found it on our map. My girls have loved this felt map that we have hanging in our school room and get so excited to see what picture they get to stick on.
We read a couple of non-fiction books on China to learn some basic facts about the food, people, language, and geography. Then we colored the Chinese flag and country outline to add to our narration notebooks. I also grabbed a few Chinese snacks to try- we all enjoyed them!
We read about China in DK Countries of the World and read about a boy that lives in China from DK Children Just Like Me. We have also been using DK A School Like Mine to read about what schooling is like in different countries.
I was excited to find SO many great Chinese books! I came home from our library with about 60 books- ha! Some of our favorites were Daisy Comes Home, Ming Lo Moves the Mountain, Lost and Found: Adele and Simon in China, and The Empty Pot. To see all the books we used, click HERE.
The topics I chose for China were pandas, Chinese New Year, and The Great Wall of China.
For the Great Wall of China, we read books about it, watched a video on YouTube, and built this 3D puzzle I found online. It wasn't as easy to put together as I thought so luckily my husband was home to help out with it. They were so proud of it and played with it all week long!
For Chinese New Year, we read about it in DK Children Just Like Me Celebrations.
I pulled out souvenirs I had from when I lived in Hong Kong. I forgot to take a picture but we pulled out Chinese decorations, traditional dishes, and red envelopes used to give money at Chinese New Year. It was so fun to show my girls things from when I lived there and it really added a dimension to our learning to see and touch things that we had talked about.
We played Chinese New Year bingo and made dragon puppets. We also read about the zodiac signs. We really enjoyed The Great Race: The Story of the Chinese Zodiac. Another good one was The Dragon's Tale and Other Fables of the Chinese Zodiac. We had fun discovering what each of our zodiac animals are.
For pandas, we enjoyed lots of books, videos, and did a fun craft!
We finished off our study by having a Chinese dinner and a movie night to watch Mulan. We had them pick out things we had learned about. Some of the ones they found were The Great Wall of China, chopsticks, rice, dumplings, Chinese characters, dragon dancers, lanterns etc.
China has such an ancient, rich culture and we loved learning about it! Our books and activities really helped us immerse ourselves into the country. Our next Asian country is India!
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