Spice Up Your Geography Lessons With Regional Foods
Spice up your middle school geography lessons with some regional foods.
Once a month, pick a country to be the focus of your meal and use food from that region and local recipes to teach your kids about the people, culture, and traditional dishes of the area you’re studying.
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These regional meals are some of the many fun geography activities we used in our homeschool.
Choosing Regional Foods
We love our geography dinners. They’re one of our favorite cultural geography activities.
A few months ago, we sat down as a family and mapped out what countries each child wanted to cover. Every month, we refer back to our list and pick which country will be the focus of that month’s dinner.
The child and parent responsible for that particular month then work together to come up with a menu that usually includes an appetizer, main dish and dessert. Most months we use Eat Your Way Around the World by Jamie Aramini. We try to incorporate food that a region is known for, but sometimes we just pick a child’s favorite.
This month we learned about Peru. Craig and Marianna made Papas a la Huancaina (Potatoes with Cheese), Arroz con Pollo (Rice with Chicken) and Alfajores (Caramel-filled Cookies).
geography Research
In addition to the dinner, we also do some research on the country and the child who is hosting makes a presentation based on this information.
For each country we research:
- location
- size (miles and # of people)
- capital
- products or industry it is known for
- recognized customs
- climate
- national symbols
- currency
- language spoken
They also add two unique facts that they found interesting.
Using Peru again as our example, here are some facts that my daughter shared in her presentation.
- location – Western South America, between Ecuador, Columbia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile
- capital – Lima
- currency – Peruvian nuevo sol
- language spoken – spanish
- unique fact – Machu Picchu and the Incas
Learning Life Skills
Aside from expanding their geographical knowledge, my daughters are also improving various life skills.
- Typing- typing up their presentations
- Research – researching the country
- Cooking – helping prepare and cook the meal
- Public Speaking – sharing their presentation
Eat Your Way Around the World is an easy way to spice up your geography lessons with regional foods. It includes multiple countries from six continents!
To expand our knowledge, I get some books from the library for us to read about the country during the month. When it fits, we also listen to local music and add in some art projects.
This has been a fun way for our family to study geography!
Do you use regional foods to enhance your geography lessons?
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OH I LOVE this! We are doing unit studies this year of each continent and I plan on cooking some regional dishes. (fingers crossed). This is a great post! Stopping by from iHN. 😉
Thanks Adrienne! We really love doing the dinners. Good luck with your regional dishes!!
I love this post Megan! Some great ideas I can use. Thank you!!
Thank you Kendra! Maybe this is something Mark and Sophia could do together!
I just love this! What great ideas! I am featuring you this week as one of my favorites from the Hearts for Home Blog Hop! Be sure to stop by my Blog, Home to 4 Kiddos tomorrow to see the post! 🙂
Thank you Lisa! I will definitely stop by.