Thursday, August 8, 2013

Around the World-Australia


For our 200th post I am going to take you on a trip to Australia! Not for real, but you can pretend like we did! Sit back and enjoy our journey to the Land Down Under!
We have been studying American History and Geography for the past couple of years, so we are ready for the World! I'm not sure how we are going to go about studying all of the continents, but we started with Australia. It is Pie Pie's favorite and small one, so it worked out quite well.


source
 
I bought each of the girls an artist notebook which has in it, wonderful blank pages. The girls can draw, write or paste pictures in them. They will be our Geography and History workbooks for the year.
I started out by looking up Australia on the Internet. I found a great and free lapbook at Homeschool Share. Then I went to the library and looked up videos and DVDs. Some of the DVDs we found were:
 Families of Australia,
The Barrier Reef and Northeast Australia,
and Australia-Destination.
 We really enjoyed the Families of Australia because the girls got to see how kids lived in a different part of the world.
We found a lot of wonderful books at our local library too.
The books we used in our study were:
 Wonderful Animals of Australia by National Geographic,
Look What Came from Australia by Ken Davis,
Endangered Animals of Australia by Marie Allgor,
 Welcome to My Country: Australia by Peter North and Susan McKay,
 Koalas by Susan Louise Kra,
 Emus by Julie Murray,
and Foods of Australia by Barbara Sheen.

The girls also drew lots of pictures of animals in their notebooks of all of their favorite animals in Australia!
We finished up our study with an Australian feast!
We started our meal with Damper. This is a bread usually made over a fire. Bread is not one of my specialties. It was very sticky so I added a lot of flour which made the bread kind of dry. I'm sure it would taste better if you are a better bread maker than me. It was pretty good if it was warmed with lots of butter.

  



For our main meal we made Toad in the Hole. This is a meal with sausages in a bread, egg, and milk mixture. They use lamb sausages, but we used regular ones. It was okay. We added some cheese to the top to make it more tasty. We love cheese!


For dessert we had Lamingtons. These were definitely the highlight of the meal. These are very easy to make, but very messy! All you need is cake, chocolate and coconut. 

 
All of these recipes can be found in Foods of Australia by Barbara Sheen. 
Our next continent is Africa. I have no idea how we are going to break that up to make it easier to learn about. I have a little time to figure that out because we are doing a Science Unit next.  Tornadoes!
I hope you enjoyed our trip to Australia!
There is lots more Princess fun to come here on our blog!