Cinco De Mayo!

Happy Cinco De Mayo!

We celebrated this Mexican holiday by talking about Mexico and the Spanish language. I found graphics on The Holiday Zone website to create a word wall of Spanish words with pictures so that even Rachel could translate some of them. For Nicholas, I asked him to come up with several sentences in which he would use some of these Spanish words in place of the English words.



We also did a few craft projects.

This first one was Mexican Jumping Bean Art which I also saw on the Holiday Zone website. You will need some paper, paint, dried beans, and an old shoe box.



Start with cutting the paper down to fit inside the shoe box and set aside.

Cover the beans with various colors of paint. Nicholas used a foam sponge brush to dab some paint on these beans.



Then he painted other beans. He had fun trying different techniques while working with such an unusual medium.



Then he used some tweezers to pick up the beans and place them on the paper inside the shoe box.



Then he put the top on the shoe box and shook it up. The bean with wet paint "jumped" all around in the box.



The jumping beans made a nice colorful design on the paper.



Our second craft project was a basic ball and cup toy. I had seen this one recommended online for a Cinco De Mayo activity but I'm not sure why because this toy isn't specific to Mexico.

We started with a plastic water bottle, stickers, yarn, and some aluminum foil.



I cut the empty water bottle in half. We only needed the top half of the bottle where the spout is. Nicholas tied a piece of yarn to the spout and then decorated the bottle with stickers.



He tied the loose piece of yard to the piece of foil.



And he crumpled the foil into a ball at the end of the yarn.



The toy was finished and Nicholas couldn't wait to try it out. He held the piece of bottle by the spout and it became the cup. Then he tried to nudge the cup up in such a way as to get the ball of foil to fly up and land in the cup. It was more challenging than he expected and the foil ball ended up hitting him several times. However, he was very excited when he did get it in.



Of course, we had to wrap up the day with burritos and sopapillas at Rosa's Cafe. While we ate I asked Nicholas to find cinco, I mean five, things in the restaurant that were on our Spanish word wall at home. It made for a fun game during dinner.

No comments:

Post a Comment