Brazil Week

 Our next country in our Around the World Homeschool curriculum was Brazil. Now this one was tricky because the focus was the rainforest, which is also a unit we're doing for science. Rather than posting ALL off the books and activities in both, I am focusing on the Brazil resources here and rainforest resources on its own post.

Books:

As always, we read about Brazil from our spines. Then we also read a TON of other books, but since most of them were about the rainforest, I'll put those on that post. More specific to Brazil, we read Steve Goes to Carnival, Bisa's Carnaval, Living in Brazil, and We Come from Brazil.

This page from A Place Called Home has homes in the Brazilian rainforest.

Activities:

Archer decided to color the flags of Brazil from his Flag Book.

Seek and Find Around the World page on Rio de Janeiro

Maze from Around the World Mazes

Flag of Brazil from Little Passports

Sensory bin with South American and Rain Forest Animals

Recipe:

We kind of went all out for Brazil and did three recipes. We had Brazillian lemonade, Feijoada (Black Bean Stew) and Pao De Queijo (Cheese Bread). 

Read Aloud:

This week we read Race the Wild Rain Forest Relay. Archer liked it enough to want to read the other books. It did a good job of having a story but inserting facts about the rainforest.

Games:

Every week I'm trying to get in at least one logic puzzle game and one board game. This week he played One in a Chameleon and we played Hiss, which I felt both fit the theme.

Art:

This week we made a little tree frog. He painted some art paper and then we traced a frog outline onto it. He used a hole punch on each hand and we put in little suction cups to let it climb the window.

Videos:

We got our movie-resistant kid to watch Rio, which he absolutely LOVED (now we have to watch Rio 2)

See other South American Country Weeks here:

Biome Unit Studies

 

Since we are working our way around the globe for our Around the World Homeschool Units and because the Next Generation Science Standards includes standards on Animals, Plants and their Environments, I decided we would also tour the world in biomes.

Eventually, we will make our way through most of them (different sources divide the earth into different numbers of biomes). We plan to do Tropical Forest, Temperate Forest, Deserts, Mountains, Savanna, Grasslands, Tundra, Oceans and Polar Regions. I will post the links to all the units here when we are done.

We started out with some books about biomes in general and some on biomes we won't actually cover directly. Some of them we only read parts of.

Counting On Earth's Biomes

Counting in the Taiga

What are Habitats and Biomes

The Environment (p 30)

Turn and Learn Our World

Questions and Answers About Biomes

Life in a Wetland

Biomes Units:

Rainforest

Temperate Forest

Mountains

Deserts

Tundra and Polar Regions

Tot School Orange Week

   

We recently wrapped out our orange week of our color themes.  As with the boys, my goal is not for her to learn her colors. You can see my tot school goals here.

Juniper was 15 months

Juniper's little area on our wall. I put up her color poster was free from Isla Hearts Teaching on TPT. I put out someorange" themed books for her. This week she actually read them better than in previous weeks.

I tried to give her a chance to use different media for her little orange coloring book pages (free here). She used colored pencils, marker and Do-a-Dot Markers

I'm introducing her to Montessori 3 Part Vocabulary Cards with some color cards. She's not ready to do them independently, but I'm modeling for her and eventually she'll get it. She does like trying to help put the word card on the picture. Sometimes she does it correctly, sometimes she doesn't, and sometimes she knocks all the cards on the floor. This week we were able to also use her color sorting food.

This week's sensory bin had some orange (and brown and yellow) rice, some orange chickpeas and some acrylic leaves and pumpkins.

Pumpkin scented play dough with little fall scatter and cookie cutters.

Stickers on orange paper.

Orange magnetic tiles on the light table.

Pumpkin Shape Matching from Totschooling. She was not quite ready to do this activity, but had fun trying.

Using orange tissue paper and contact paper to make a pumpkin sun catcher.

This week's shelves were pretty simple. Some felt shapes, some balance beams, her Spinagain, a South American Animal matching activity from big brother's school (she likes to play with them), a puzzle, a stacking toy, orange sorting food and a bin or orange toys.

Shapes from a gross motor game I made for Archer (templates here). Sometimes she will go to the shape or color you call out. Mostly, she goes where she wants.

Here first time really trying to use the balance beams. She much preferred holding my hand.

Trying out the stacking toy.

She's just about got this puzzle mastered.

You can check out our other Color Theme posts here:

South America Activities and Resources

 

As we go through our Around the World studies, I thought I'd share some of the resources we used (or other ones I found but we didn't get to). 

South America page in the Barefoot Books World Atlas Sticker Book

South American Spread from Beginning Geography

North American page in his Flag Sticker Atlas

We also looked through the North American pages in our various atlases (you can see which ones we use here). This spread is from the Lift-The-Flap Picture Atlas

Maze from Around the World Mazes

South American Animal Vocabulary Cards (free here) with Toob Animals to match.

Both of my younger kids play with animal figurines a lot, so I got out our South American animals (regular size, not Toob size). We have a spider monkey, mama tapir and baby tapir, a sloth and tree, llamas and alpacas, a jaguar and a capybara (similar).

South America Continent Art. We traced a map of the continent onto art paper, crisscrossed it with washi tape and then used water color to color it in. Then he cut it out and glued it to construction paper.

South America GeoPuzzle

He colored a map of South America. He used his Flag Book for help him do each country as a flag (all his choice).

Biome map from the Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

South America Page from A World of Gratitude

Other books he read.

South American Countries Units:

Brazil
Argentina and Chile

Peru

Ecuador, Galapagos and South American Wrap Up