It is time for Sharing Saturday!! This is a link party to share all of your child-oriented crafts, crafts made for kids, activities and lessons as well as your parenting and/or teaching posts.
On Sunday night we also host Crafty Weekends for all your crafts (done by any age), patterns, and craft product reviews! It is the perfect place to share your creative side!! And for all of your cultural posts come share them at the monthlyCreative Kids Culture Blog Hop.
Thank you to everyone who shared with us at our last party! It was a very small party but full of great ideas! Our features are just a sampling of them so if you haven't checked them all out, you should! This week we have one group of features.
Disclosure:I was sent these products to review free of charge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. Tonight I am going to share some books for the younger readers. These books are board books and picture books and are for our youngest kids. They leave the reader with a good feeling or are just really silly. The first book is Vegetables in Underwear by Jared Chapman. From the title you can tell it will be a bit silly.
Disclosure: Tuttle Publishing gave me copy of this book free of charge for this review. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.
So last month our plan was to have a Japanese tea party for Tea Parties Around the World, but life interfered and our tea party happened in May instead, but this is perfect since it is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. So through April and into May we have been exploring Japan. Now Japan is known for its tea ceremony. It sounds so fancy and has an interesting history. To learn more about the tea ceremony we read Tea Ceremony by Shozo Sato.
This book covers everything from a brief history of tea and the types of tea in Japan to the history of the tea ceremony itself. It also gives steps on how to have a tea ceremony at home. We did not try this because I am a bit intimidated by the tea ceremony and I do not feel like we have the right space for it. I had hoped to find a local place that offers them, but I couldn't. The process of the making the tea is a huge part of the Japanese tea ceremony. It is about finding peace and harmony with one's guests. In Japan how the food and drink look is as important if not more important than how it tastes, so presentation is a huge thing in the ceremony. There are different supplies and displays for a traditional tea ceremony.
The book goes into the various utensils and types of them often used in the tea ceremony. There are also various steps to the ceremony with various spaces of each one. There are also various steps to making the actual tea. This book gives beautiful photograph tutorials to them.
It is a fun book to learn about this amazing tradition. It provides kids with what they need to know to try their own.
Plus another favorite resource for us is The Magic Tree House series.
Now we know a bit about Japan and its culture so we will tell you about our tea party and our Japanese craft. For our tea party we went to David's Tea and asked our friend there for a good Japanese tea. He sold us Sencha Ashikubo.
He gave me the warning of not steeping too much because it will get a very grassy taste. It was too grassy for us, but we tried it. I used our Chinese tea cups and a tea pot I felt looked a bit Japanese. (It was a gift, so I do not know the history of it.)
We also found some instant Japanese soups to try. Since we were a bit busy we did not try to make anything from scratch this time.
We put a little of each soup into our regular tea cups so we could each try it. We liked the udon soup better than the miso.
To go with our tea party I wanted to do a craft. We found a fun craft making kokeshi dolls in this book.
Ours are made from origami paper (ours is from Tuttle Publishing), a toilet paper roll and a ping pong ball. I made one but Hazel has not gotten around to making hers yet.
Hazel loves how mine came out though. What do you think? Now I also have sewn a kimono for Hazel's 18-inch dolls.
So that is our exploration of Japan with a Japanese tea party. This post is part of the Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month Blog Series and Giveaway!!
Welcome to our fourth annual Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month Blog Series and Giveaway! Follow along all month for ideas about sharing with kids the rich cultures of this vast and varied region. Also, be sure to enter the giveaway below and link up your posts at the bottom of the page. For even more ideas, visit our blog hops from last year, 2015 and 2014. You can also follow our Asia and Australia & Oceania boards on Pinterest.
Disclosure: Tuttle Publishing gave me copy of this book free of charge for this review. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation. Tomorrow we are sharing our exploration of Japan and our Japanese tea party as our post for the Multicultural Kid Blogs' Asian Pacific Island Heritage Month Series & Giveaway. To kick off our exploration of Japan I thought it would be great to share two Japanese arts in one book -- origami and bonsai. The book is Origami Bonsai by Benjamin John Coleman.
Disclosure:I was sent these products to review free of charge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. Can you believe tomorrow is Mother's Day? Where has the time gone? I suppose with all the recent changes in our lives time is really flying. A few weeks ago we pulled Hazel from her school and I began homeschooling her until the end of this school year. We will be sending her to a new school in the fall. However I have to say I have a lot of respect for anyone who chooses to homeschool. It is a lot of work and this is with the workbooks and such that she was already using this year. Go Teach offered me some supplies for Teacher Appreciation Week to make gifts and I explained I was now homeschooling, but thought they would make nice Mother's Day gifts for the homeschooler (or for end of the year gifts for a teacher). (Now I know most moms probably want something for themselves and not their classroom, but some of the supplies could be used for their own crafts as well.) Plus I have some fun books about moms and spending time with your mom for younger kids from MacMillan Publishers. We will start with some gift ideas. I was sent white board markers, glue sticks and scented twistable crayons.
