MemeTales Readathon Week 6: Global Culture

The books for this week are Cora Cooks Pancit by Dorina Lazo Gilmore, Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth by Joan Schoettler, Mandy and Pandy Say "Ni Hao Ma?" by Chris Lin and Mandy and Pandy Visit China by Chris Lin.



The Mandy and Pandy stories are meant to introduce the child to Chinese and have both English and Chinse in them.I will admit I am not good at pronouncing the Chinese, but I did try. Cora Cooks Pancit is about a Filipino family and cooking a favorite meal. Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth takes place in Korea. Since they were all focused in Asia, we did Asian crafts.

I took out the book, The Kids' Multicultural Art Book by Alexandra M. Terzian from the library. We will be doing several crafts from this book in the near future. Hazel also found a Valentine's Day craft we did and wanted me to buy her more felt hearts so she could decorate them. I remembered seeing the felt elephants on clearance at Michaels recently and asked her if she would like one of those for now. So off we went to Michaels to buy it. She chose purple for the color and started decorating it with glitter glue before I could snap the picture.
She did not do too much glitter glue so tomorrow I think I'll look for the gem stickers and let her decorate with those.
While at Michaels we also bought this plastic bracelet. I let her decorate it with glitter glue, but then added a design since she hadn't done too much. It sort of reminds me of some African jewelry I have seen.
Next we attempted some Chinese Paper Cutting from the art book mentioned above. I drew out half a man similar to the picture in the book on a folded piece of construction paper and asked Hazel to cut it out. She had some difficulty and asked me to finish it. She had cut some parts off by the time she gave it to me, but here it is.
Did you know paper was invented by the Han Dynasty more than 2000 years ago? At least that is what the books says. After her issues with cutting this I did the rest of them. The traditional papercuts are used for a sign of good luck in China for celebrations, festivals and decorations. Here are the other two patterns the book gave us.
I also traced a Thai owl "kite" for Hazel to decorate. It didn't come out perfect, but it was good enough for us. Hazel used some watercolors on it.
We also went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients of the Cora's favorite meal: pancit. We are going to make it for dinner tomorrow. I cooked the chicken for it today, but we did not have time to make the whole dish today. I will share the recipe I found on-line with the adaptations we are making to match the book and our likes tomorrow.

Here are a few books we have been enjoying that introduce other cultures. I will be sharing more about these in another post (probably at a Multicultural Monday), but thought I would share the titles now in case you want to join in on this theme.


We also almost bought a Japanese fan today when we were out, but Hazel chose another toy instead since I told her I had the instructions to make one in the art book mentioned above, so we will be making one very soon.

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