Christmas Around the World

My theme for this week is Christmas Around the World since I knew we were going to the Museum of Science and Industry yesterday to see the Christmas Trees from Around the World and the Star Wars exhibit.

The day before we went I downloaded the podcasts found here. They include brief 45 second to minute and a half descriptions of the Christmas customs of each country. They don't specifically describe the trees at the museum so if you're doing a Christmas Around the World homeschool unit study, it could be a fun supplement. I loaded them onto my iPod for the kids to listen to at the museum. However, the podcasts are in alphabetical order by country which is not at all how the trees were arranged at the museum. Alex tried it out for a couple of trees and then gave up. We just read the signs on each tree aloud.

Here are some photos of some of the trees....



(loved this little origami guy!)



And here was our family's favorite tree...the tree form Poland.

Today we continued our Christmas Around the World study. But first we worked on our Hands of a Child lapbook on Snow that we had started. Today we learned about the different types of frost and how artificial snow is made. The kids also started assembling their lapbook.

After that we listened to the podcasts about the trees we saw yesterday while the kids drew their favorite ornaments that they saw. Next we listened to the tape of the book The Legend of the Poinsettia. It was a great little book about Christmas in Mexico. And then we moved on to Japan and the kids worked on origami ornaments from ActivityTV.

Well... that's all we did worth writing about!