Goodbye Ale!!!

We have hosted 35 students in our home in the last 5 years. We absolutely LOVE opening our home to people around the world! Ale is a precious girl from Mexico!! Her brother stayed with us a couple years ago and it was a joy having her become a part of our family the last three months. Why does this matter to our home school adventures? My children LOVE greeting our students from different countries. It gives them an experience in opening their hearts to many cultures and allows them to learn about different foods, beliefs, languages and such! We will miss our friend Ale dearly!!



 
Here we are celebrating Ale’s birthday!! Oh how the boys LOVE her!

She LOVED playing with the boys!! Here they are beautifying her!! We also taught Ale about St. Patrick's Day by making green cupcakes!!

China!!

We have started learning about China this week. We have spent a lot of time on it as the boys are half Chinese! We started off the week building the great wall of China. The kids were fascinated by it! We watched some real wonderful You-Tube videos produced by National Geographic about how the wall was built and what it was used for. The kids thought we would see pictures of the bad guys and were dissapointed that the wall stands for friendship now! Pretty cute!!
Erica at http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/ has fantastic instructions on how she made this wall! The kids LOVED it!!!
First we started out by drawing some lines on white foam board and started gluing the craft blocks to it.


Then we made funny faces!! No just kidding! Here is the base of the Great Wall of China!

Then we put a layer of paper for support and added more layers!



The boys thought it was so funny that they could see each other on the other side! And Mateo is thinking about the Great Wall!!!
             
And… the final product!! The perfect touch…….Darth Vader and the clone wars!!! Might as well reenact what the wall was originally used for!!! This was an extremely fun project to do!!



This week we have learned where China is on the map, that is in the Northern Hemisphere and on the continent of Asia. The boys learned Yangtze and the Huang He rivers and located them on a map. We learned about the Yuan, we practiced writing our names in Chinese and much more!!

We read about what children are like in China, what their school day is like, what sports they like to play, and what foods they like to eat. The kids thought it was very cool that EVERYONE in China eats with chopsticks! My kids grew up using them! My little thought we should move to China since we do that already!! I told him I would move there any day!!


We put the most common animals of China on our animal wall. Here the kids are pointing to their favorite animal from China!! (See: http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/ for a list of these animals.)


Here we made Chinese Lanterns! See: http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/ for directions or the book A Trip Around the World.



I am not quite finished, however above the kids beds, I have painted their Chinese names!!! This was lots of fun!!!