Christmas Around the World 2022--South Africa

 We are beginning our Christmas trip around the world with countries in Africa and South America and then moving to countries in Europe because that is where our studies have been this semester. 

We are also focusing on Light in our science studies as we observe the change in light as we move to the Solstice and anticipate Christmas and celebrating The Light the World, Jesus Christ, As we travel around the world we will be looking for light and participating in the Light the World challenge.

First Stop on our trip around the world: Christmas in South Africa!

We listened to some beautiful African Christmas music first:

 African Carol: Sing Noel

Drummer Boy, Mzansi Youth Choir

Drummer Boy: Alex Boye and Genesis Choir

We have been learning about some African Instruments.  The Kalimba is a neat "thumb piano" and we enjoyed watching this performance.

We learned some things about what South Africans eat and do to celebrate Christmas here. There are many countries listed and we are looking forward to learning a lot of new things! This is a great resource!

Christmas from Both Worlds is a picture book about Armani who goes to visit South Africa for Christmas.

If you have older children:

A video of someone talking about what it is like to celebrate Christmas in South Africa,

A video of photos and how to say Merry Christmas in different languages spoken in Africa

Corn!

 We live in the midwest and the corn harvest is happening right now.  Corn is also a major plant and food source of Latin America (month 9) and also an important part of the Pilgrim's experience as they came to America (month 2). We also are excited about learning more about corn because of our ongoing study of Botany that we started this summer! This week we drew the parts of the corn plant into our Botany Notebook.

We watched a dissection video of corn to see the different parts of the corn seed and learned it is a monocot.

We learned that the Mayan name for Corn is Ixim. And watched this film about the creation story of the Mayan with corn.

We loved this book called Corn is Maize so much on YouTube that I ordered a copy for our family library. Amazon Link

Because corn is such an important crop for Native Americans we listened to the music of  the Corn Dance of the Pueblo Indians

And this corn grinding song and this video.  Music makes work better!

These picture books came from our LiftEd Botany study and we watched the read aloud on YouTube:

 about Roots 

How a Seed Grows

After playing in a corn pit at the farm we love the sensory aspect of corn too!

Next up is fun with popcorn

and corn meal

Chocolate!

We are studying Chocolate! Why? It started because of 3 things: 

We were studying countries in Africa (with LiftEd) and one thing we learned is that almost half of the world's chocolate comes from African countries. (Africa Month 8) We have also been talking about how slavery and child labor has a history with chocolate, including today (Slavery Month 8).  These are sobering topics to discuss.  They affect today's children so it matters to us!

We are starting to look at some countries in South America (Latin America Month 9) right now as well.  Since cacao beans grow along the equator, we have been learning about the Mayans and about their chocolate experience and how the Spanish encountered chocolate (Spanish Main Month 2 -which is where we should be on the rotation schedule, but we are loving wandering around right now!) 

We are still working through our Botany Study that we started over the summer.  Cacao trees are so cool and have been a neat plant to add into our study! (We are using this science unit in a very WEH way so that it suits our Family Academy learning style.)

And also, its almost Halloween so there are treats on everyone's mind.  What better time to learn about one of our favorite treats? We are also studying the human body (Human Body Month 9) because this time of year there are skeletons everywhere. We will look into digestion of chocolate too!

I'm sharing some of our resources for our study. These resources we found on YouTube:

We started with the picture book: Chocolate Tree A Mayan Folk Tale 

Amazon link

Then watched a short TedEd video about the history of chocolate.  This talks about some of the slavery issues with cacao harvest.

Time Lapse of a Cacao Tree is so cool from seed to plant!

Next we watched a video that shows from harvest to chocolate what the process looks like.

This harvest video of cacao is so beautiful.

We enjoyed watching how Swiss Chocolate is made.  This inspired us to try to make our own chocolate!

M read Charlie and the Chocolate factory and we tried to take a field trip to a chocolate factory.  It didn't work out so we will try again!

We had an epic chocolate poetry tea time with chocolate tasting from 40%-100% cacao. And Hot chocolate to drink, of course!