Holidays Around the World: Brazil

We were pretty busy yesterday designing a new suit for Santa at the request of Mrs. Claus, but we managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Brazil to learn about how Christmas is celebrated.

As always, we started our trip by marking our destination on our map so we could see where we were headed:

Next, we hopped aboard the Holiday Express, listened to Noite Feliz, and watched a slideshow of pictures from Christmas celebrations in Brazil.  Upon landing, we got our passports stamped:

Then, we watched our powerpoint about Christmas in Brazil.  We learned that kids there call Santa Claus, Papi Noel, and that he delivers gifts to them just as Santa does to us. Everyone was jealous to hear that kids in Brazil not only get gifts on Christmas from Papi Noel, but also get gifts from the 3 wise men six days later! We learned that people there celebrate each year with a huge fireworks display, similar to what we have here on the 4th of July.

We quickly filled out our scrapbook page:

And finally we made our souvenir from the trip: fireworks!

I usually don't let the kids use glitter themselves as it can make such a mess and it's easy to waste too much of it if you don't know how to use it.  However, for this project I let them use the glitter themselves and they did a great job. I love how they purposefully put different colors of glitter in different places of the fireworks to make them rainbow colored. So pretty!

Next stop: Antarctica!

Side note: Everyone is already wondering what we will be doing there. Students have already pointed out that no one really lives there, it's just too cold. Check back Monday to see!