Virtual File Cabinet

I'm going to switch gears (sort of) for a little bit on the blog, and use it to store some ideas for school-related activities.  Mainly because I deplore the amount of space that a file cabinet takes up, and then once you need something it takes forever to find it, even if it's filed, which who has time to do that anyway?  If I save it to the computer, and the computer dies, it's gone.  So here we are.  

In case you are interested in the back story, because there is always a very long back story, a few years ago we were gifted this fabulous book: 

This book profiles children in countries all over the world, telling about their typical day, families, school, religion, games they play, food they eat, etc.  At the time, none of my children were school age, and it was too nice a book to let them rip the pages out of, so it sat on a shelf for a while.  Then when my oldest started Kindergarten, we got it out and just sort of read through it together.  We read almost every kid, and took several days to do it, so that we ended up going through one or two kids a week and we would talk about it.  Towards the end of this little endeavor I started trying to cook some of the dishes from other countries.  Mainly because I was tired of them complaining about food, so when we would study a kid who was from Africa and ate hot mash 3 times a day, I'd point that out and serve hot mash for dinner one night and then hope to drive home a point.  Evidently this exercise did not stick. For long. 

Fast forward to now ending 3rd grade, 2nd grade, and another Kinder, plus two 4-year olds, and the book has resurfaced; due largely to the fact that we will be done with our 2014-2015 curriculum in exactly one week (at which point I am throwing myself a party). Since it's not summer yet, I didn't feel like we could quite call it a wrap, but didn't want to start next year already.  After attending a missions conference a few weeks ago, I was inspired. So here we are.  

I had the kids go through and pick out 10 (which may be expanded at a later date) kids whose culture we will try to study a little more in depth than last time.  I'm going to keep track of what countries we study, any reading material, recipes, art projects, etc.  that we do related to said countries so that if the book should resurface in yet another 3 years, I'll have some record of what we did, what worked, what didn't, etc.  If you follow this little series of posts, I hope you find it informative and inspirational.