"Traveling" to South Korea

Our next country "visit" was Korea. I searched for all of the Korean children's books at our libraries. Here is what we found:

Sumi's First Day of School Ever - Soyung Pak

dear juno - Soyung Pak

The Name Jar - Yangsook Choi

The Firekeeper's Son - Linda Sue Park

Welcome to South Korea - Karen Kwek & Johanna Masse

We enjoyed all of these books! The fiction books are very sweet stories, mostly about Korean children who are living in the United States but thinking about different aspects of their lives and culture in Korea. If we revisit Korea, I will look for these books I saw at learning ALL the time!! last week.

With every country, I have the kids work the applicable puzzle in The Seven Continents of the World Jigsaw Puzzle book (which includes six 48 piece puzzles). They try to locate North and South Korea on the completed map.

We look through all of our geography books, including Atlas of the World, Our World: A Country-by-Country Guide, and The DK Picturepedia: People and Places, and read all of the pages about our country.

For an art project, I printed off a blank flag of South Korea, which we focused on during our lessons.

They painted it with the appropriate colors,

and then brushed (with a Q-tip) glue on the remaining white portion.

I snagged some dry rice from one of their sensory bins, and they scattered it all over the glue to represent the white portion of the flag. We had talked about how rice is an important crop and food in South Korea.

Here are some of our notebooking pages, which were printed from Homeschool Creations.

We were fortunate enough to experience eating at a Korean (It was also upscale vegan.) restaurant on our NYC trip in November. (I wrote about it on my food blog.) It was very cool! My oldest son with sensory issues was pretty upset, at first, about having to take his shoes off at the door - but the kids loved the atmosphere and how the seats are on the floor with holes below for your feet. They loved all of the different courses and choices - and the citron juice "tea"!

We even prepared a Korean meal at home. A couple of years ago, the kids participated in a Summer Blog Swap, and Dash was paired up with Kaden, who was adopted from South Korea. They had sent us, among many many wonderful things - a recipe for Korean "barbecue," which is called Bulgogi. We veganized this recipe using seitan, and it was delicious!!! I served it with rice, stir-fry, and kimchi.

They also sent us a Korean ornament, which we've had on display during our Korea studies

another stamp in the kids' passports after our fun "visit"

Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn: Geography/History Link-Up