Dena De Clute

World Geography Wednesday Studies Japan

Like most of you, I’ve been searching for interesting activities to occupy my children other than letting them play video games until their eyeballs bleed.

And we’ve been missing going to restaurants since Covid restrictions began. (Sadly, my interest in whipping up culinary masterpieces at the beginning of our marriage morphed into microwaving chicken nuggets after we had kids.)

We travel a lot, and we love eating international food. You learn so much about a culture by their cuisine. Both my kids were born overseas, so this is something I want to instill in them.

The win-win solution came to me in the form of…teaching my kids to cook! Thus World Geography Wednesday was born.

World Geography Wednesday

It’s been a pleasure to resume my hobby of going through my international cookbooks and shopping for weird ingredients. But although my kids are getting older, I still don’t have time to make everything from scratch. The good news is, they don’t mind if I buy as much of it pre-made as possible – they’re just happy to spend time with me and prepare something delicious that they get to eat.

Still, I’m only doing this once a week, because I’m not a martyr.

Pull Out Your Maps

I don’t make a big deal about planning the lesson, because I don’t have the energy with all my other projects in the works. All we do is pick a country to eat from, look up maps on rainfall, population, etc. in my college geography book, read some obscure facts from THE WORLD’S MOST ADVENTUROUS KID by Dylan Thuras and Rosemary Mosco, and watch Nat Geo Kids videos.

Twenty minutes, tops. (Although admittedly, cooking takes longer.)

Then we eat and watch a movie from that country. If I can’t find anything suitable, we read a book. Hands down, it’s become our favorite night of the week.

Even mine.

Teaching Kids About Japan

Here are some photos of our first one, on Japan. The powdered miso soup was understandably meh, but they adored the seaweed salad. And I’m so grateful my kids eat sushi!

I was pumped to watch ISLE OF DOGS – until my son reminded me of the gory surgery scene.  We agreed that my daughter (she’s younger) would probably freak out and watched GODZILLA instead.  Afterwards, we read NINJA by Arree Chung, because – you know – BOOKS!