Friday, February 23, 2018

Africa Week Three and Recipes for a Feast

Today was the culmination of our Africa main lesson block and we ended with a party. We cooked four recipes and sat down in the afternoon and enjoyed them, along with my African Playground CD from Putamayo World Music!

Yesterday we were so fortunate to have Ms. Sharifa come as a special guest and give us a lesson in Swahili. She taught us the words to the Jambo song, and then today we were able to sing along to the music during our feast.


Our African Feast recipes were:


I couldn't find teff (an Ethiopian grain) in any of the grocery stores in Carbondale, so I ordered it from Amazon.


This week has been busy and FULL of reports! Our schedule was:

  • Monday - Animal Reports
  • Tuesday - Country Reports
  • Thursday - People Reports
  • Friday - Bonus Reports & Feast Day


Students proudly presented animal reports on their favorite animals of their biomes. We learned about the knifefish (wetlands), hooved hyrax (mountains), giant African snail (tropical forests), cheetah (grasslands), and sandgrouse (deserts). There was also a bonus report on the Nile crocodile.

The younger group also researched and presented people reports focused on a native people of the biomes. They taught us about how fundamental needs such as shelter, transportation, food, and clothing are met by the Masai (grasslands), the fellah of the Nile Delta (wetlands), the Konso (mountains), the !Kung (deserts), and the Efe pygmies (tropical forests).

When needed, older students paired up with younger to help with research, summarizing, editing, writing on the posters, and presentations. It was so much fun to watch them demonstrate the n!n!ahua game of the !Kung children. Students also worked in pairs preparing the recipes for our feast.

One student who was absent last week shared his book report on Journey to Jo'burg: A South African Story. He did project #3, the Wanted Poster, and his classmates gave him a 13/16 on our Oral Book Report rubric.


For the country reports, the older students each presented a country PLUS an animal which lives there. We heard about Lesotho and the white-tailed rat, Niger and the fennec fox, Chad and the African bush elephant, and -- last but not least -- Madagascar. Leah loved so many of the animals from Madagascar that she included lots of them on her poster: the ring-tailed lemur, tenrec, Morgan sphinx moth, flatid sapsucker, satanic leaf gecko, and the pygmy mouse lemur.

We also had an older student do an extra assignment on Mansa Musa (the link is to an excellent lesson plan from Stanford History Education Group's "Reading Like a Historian" series) and share what he learned with the class. This happened on Thursday morning after we read the story about another famous king, who was an ancestor of Mansa Musa, named Sundiata.

Of course, I still continued to read picture books to the group daily. We couldn't possibly read aloud all of the books which I checked out from the library, but I did my best to give the children a wide-ranging view of Africa. Here were the books for Week Three:


This morning we also did an art project with chalk pastels which accompanied The Village of Round and Square Houses. It was interesting to work with different colored backgrounds; I had an assortment of colors of pastel paper! This art lesson is found in Teaching Art with Books Kids Love: Art Elements, Appreciation, and Design with Award-Winning Books.


This post contains affiliate links to the materials I actually use for homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. Thank you for your support!

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