Around the world - Week 4 - Middle East

This week we learned about Lebanon, Isreal, and Egypt.

 

 Of course, we colored flags this week.  However, we ended up doing so at the end of the week, for all three countries.  I never got around to printing them at the beginning as I should have.  Sigh.

 Notice how we tend to do our crafts at breakfast?  yeah, that seems to be when we do our crafts lately.

 Anyway, Monday and Tuesday we learned of Lebanon.  We recently got a book that details things that we should pray for in specific countries, and so we learned a little of Lebanon through this book.  We also learned that food and hospitality are important to the Lebanese people, so I made the two Lebanese recipes included in the itinerary and invited my parents over to enjoy them with us.  One turned out ok (the roasted eggplant dip for pitas, called Baba Ghanouj) but the salad, Tabbouleh... not so great.  I ended up freezing the rest of it for soups (it was mostly parsley... yuck for a salad).

Anyway, we also made a collage of things we praise God for.  Alhamdulillah is a word used by Christians and Muslims in Lebanon which means praise to God.  So, we were to be intentional about praising God through our day.  So, we made these collages as our activity.

 

Isreal was the country for Wednesday and Thursday.  We played 'hold the rope', an Israeli game.  We all need to hold onto a rope (or in our case, a long piece of fabric, haha) with both hands while attempting to put hats on.  Each other's heads.  Yup.   A fun exercise that focussed on the value of teamwork.  The bible verses for the day were in 1 Corinthians 12:12-31... the verses on how the body is made of many members.  The kids thought the idea of everyone being nothing but ears or eyes pretty funny.  They talked about that for a while.  So, the teamwork game was a fun bit of learning about how we all need to work together, and how we are all different (it was funny watching the kids try to get the hat on my head).  We also looked at family pictures to note how we celebrated big events (grads, birthdays, etc) and then learned about bar mitzvahs.  We watched a video on Youtube that showed a bar mitzvah celebration, and the kids loved the outfits and music.

 

Friday and Saturday we learned of Egypt.  On Friday we made an Egyptian breakfast, Ful Medames.  Basically, fava beans with pita bread (biscuits in our case) with hard boiled eggs.  Saturday we learned about how the people of Egypt are not free to worship God or read the Bible as we are.  We didn't do the activity.  Weekends tend to be busy and I forget things.  We were to to write out the verse 1 Peter 3:14 on index cards, and get the kids to find the hidden cards in the house and put them together (I think we'll put numbers on them to help... the back, maybe?).

 

So, that has been our week in the Middle East!  This week is Africa!