Our next country we completed for our Around the World studies was Spain! As we are nearing the end of our school year, you will see that we are starting to simplify and slow down a lot more. Not as many activities and crafts as normal, but we still had a lot of fun learning about Spain and ended up combining a few topics into one project.
If you are just jumping into these blog posts you can see how we complete them and all the ones we have done so far linked at the end of this post HERE. I also have a review of the curriculum I have been using as our spine HERE.
Like all the other countries, we started by checking out Spain in our Maps book and Dk Countries of the World. We also always add reading about another kid from each country in Children Just Like Me; so for Spain we read about Lucas.
We add the country map to their notebooks and label the capital, major landmarks, rivers, and neighboring countries or bodies of water. We painted the flag for Spain and hung it in our schoolroom. (Large flag printable are included in the Traveling the World curriculum.) We also added this fun I Spy page.
When learning about Spain we focused on bulls, flamenco dancing, and Picasso.
Books
Surprisingly as we are getting into European countries, there aren’t as many picture books for certain countries. I had trouble finding many for Spain, but these are the ones we did read and really enjoyed. Some other great books not pictured: Barcelona City Trails by Moira Butterfield, Building on Nature: the Life of Antoni Galdi by Rachel Rodriguez, Food Fight Fiesta by Tracey Kyle, and The Key from Spain by Debbie Levy.
Science
For science we learned all about bulls. We love The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, so we read the book, listened to it on the Yoto player, watched the old school cartoon on Disney+, and had a family movie night to watch the full movie, Ferdinand. They did THIS drawing tutorial to draw a bull and we learned/labelled the parts of a beef animal from Farm Anatomy by Julia Rothman. (Drawing tutorial says it is an ox, but it looks like a bull to me. LOL)
We also watched multiple videos on YouTube about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. After, I had my kids do an illustration and write what it is all about. We will add this to their notebook.
History
For history we learned all about flamenco dancing: its origin, what it is, about their clothing, etc. We learned all this information by doing Google searches and learning how to search for information on the internet. Of course, we watched a video or two and learned a few steps from THIS video.
We also did a fun flamenco craft in our notebook. I took a photo of my daughter, printed it from my computer, cut it out (I cut her legs off,) and glued it in her notebook. We took 2 coffee filters and folded them in half. She colored them with markers and we glued them on her picture to make her skirt. She then added some facts and bullet points on what we had learned about. You could also make a flamenco paper fan from THIS tutorial.
We also focused on learning about Pablo Picasso. We loved reading about him from these books as well as the book Little People, Big Dreams: Pablo Picasso by Maria Vegara. He did so many great art pieces, but we decided to focus on his creation of cubism. HERE is a great art history lesson for kids.
Here is an art piece by Picasso on bulls that I thought was so cool!
Art
I decided to finish our Spain studies with a fun project that combined many of the things we learned about: Picasso, cubism, and bulls. I got this great idea from artcampla.com and they have a template you could purchase if you need it. I cut our large bull heads out of cardboard. (Tip: draw one head and cut it out. Use it to trace more and cut them out for multiple children.) I drew the outline for the head, nose, and horns, but let the kids design all of the shapes and lines within the whole bull. Then we pulled out all our paint colors. They chose what paint colors to do, but I encouraged them to use bright colors and to try to not let any one color touch. This was a great challenge for them, and they turned out so great! After the paint dried, we went over all the lines and shapes with a black marker, so they stand out.
That was it! A simple study on Spain, but we had a lot of fun. It was nice to slow down and try to combine things if I could.
We are studying European countries till the end of our school year, so next you can find my blog post all about Sweden.
Wishing you a great week!
– Lindsay
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