Australia

Okay the continent box is taking ages to complete so in the mean time I thought I'd post about some of the activities we have been doing.

I have to say it's been soooo fun learning all about Australia and I have learned just as many new things as L. I also wanted to start off by saying that the reason I picked Australia to start with instead of North America is because even before we began our activities it was constantly a topic of conversation.  We've been Skyping with some wonderful friends there and my dad just got back from a holiday there.  So to me it seemed like a natural progression to start with this continent.  I also decided to just keep our studies concentrated on  Australia for now.  When L gets older and we revisit it we will talk about the other countries in this area.

So here we go....

I found this wonderful site that has a page with tons of Aboriginal symbols.  L and I talked about rock paintings and the different symbols and their meanings.  We then made up stories with our painted symbols.

L's is in the middle.  The cool thing was that L could tell my stories by the symbols I painted. 

Here is the link to that fantastic printout.

Next we talked about Didgeridoos and listened to and watched lots of examples of people playing on Youtube.  We talked about how they are made and that they were originally invented by the Aboriginal peoples of Northern Australia.

We also talked about dot art and looked at many examples.

Here are our own versions out of wrapping paper tubes.
We painted them brown first and then added our dot art decorations.  I painted on the animals on L's and she added the dots.

L really wanted to play like a real Aboriginal person so we painted her with white paint with some Aboriginal symbols.  L was VERY serious about the whole thing and put on a little concert for us. (I hope this doesn't offend anyone.  We have being studying all types of Australian culture with the utmost respect)

I found this amazing song on Youtube call True Blue Wonders which uses the didgeridoo to make the sounds of different Australian animals.  This is what L is playing to in the picture.

You can also download this song and it comes along with lots of great teaching materials.

Today we listened to it in my music class, tapped along with rhythm sticks and made didgeridoos.  They were such a hit that we're doing it again next week!

The most amazing bit is about four days ago a small import store in our area had a going out of business sale and unbelievably they had an actual didgeridoo on sale for only $35!!!  So of course I had to get it and we've been learning to play it ever since.  The kids in the music class went crazy for it and couldn't get enough!

Pics to follow in another post.