We enjoyed our visit to Spain this week in our homeschool. Highlights for us were the food, some very unique festivals, flamenco dancing, and of course, books.

Spanish Food

As for food, we decided to go with Spanish tapas so that we could try lots of things. We really enjoyed romesco sauce as well as sardines on toast, chorizo and cheese, and lots of olives. Basically we made sandwiches out of all the ingredients. But our favorite was our version of churros con chocolate. Churros are supposed to be long and thin but since they were translated as donuts in one of our books, we couldn’t get donuts off the brains so we went ahead and used our donut pan. And for the chocolate to dip them in, we used Mommynificent’s super easy (and sugar free) Healthy Chocolate recipe. They were so good!

Spanish Activities We Learned About

Bignificent (age 11) has just finished taking a beginning Spanish class from a Spaniard here so she had recently heard about the tomatina festival and was keen to share about it with all of us. We really enjoyed this YouTube video about it. She was also pretty intrigued by the human tower competition which you can see here. We also tried to watch one about the running of the bulls but it got too gory for us really quickly. I have to be honest that I was a little freaked out by all of these festivals! They all seem so unsafe to me – I have to admit I was happy NOT to be in any of the venues we were watching.

Flamenco dancing, on the other hand, was something we all enjoyed learning about. I love the music and the girls enjoyed learning some of the steps. We watched several YouTube videos of dances and then found this great little tutorial which helped the girls feel like they were getting some of the basics.

Books about Spain

As for books, Thea Stilton won the girls’ favorite vote, yet again. Here’s the link to that literary gem as well as a few others we enjoyed. These are in addition to the beautiful books included in our Winter Promise curriculum written and published by Winter Promise themselves.

• Thea Stilton and the Spanish Dance Mission
• Molly and the Magic Suitcase: Molly Goes to Barcelona by Chris Oler (author) and Amy Houston Oler (Illustrator) – This was a cute little picture book showing and describing some highlights of Barcelona that was particularly enjoyed by my five year old. 
• Mission Barcelona: A Scavenger Hunt Adventure (For Kids) by Catherine Aragon – This is one of a really unique series of travel books for kids that we stumbled on this week. It is intended for use in an actual visit to Barcelona and is a way to try and engage kids while you travel so they aren’t playing video games the whole time and missing the whole experience. While I can’t attest to its effectiveness at its intended use, we did enjoy it for our virtual visit.
• The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf – No visit to Spain is complete without including this beautiful classic, in my opinion.
• Children Just Like Me: Celebrations! by Anabel and Barnabas Kindersley – This is a favorite of ours that we pull out quite often when we are learning about different cultures.

Well, that wraps up our week! Do you have any activities or books for Spain that we should have done? If so, please do share as I’ll be teaching this again in a few years!

See you next week for Italy!