Week of January 15th, 2018

HAPPY THAI PONGAL!

Each year we learn about this interesting and colorful harvest festival on the Tamil calendar year from Sri Lanka, neighbor to India. We listened today to Sri Lankan Radio on Youtube to get a feel for the music which greatly resembles traditional Indian music in its instrumentation and semi-tones. Check it out below!

We also learned three important things about the festival:

1) People boil rice and milk until it bubbles over in pots, to symbolize prosperity. Sometimes honey is added! We pretended to cook up rice today and talked about how hot it gets.

2) Cows and their milk are considered very valuable and precious in Sri Lanka. Cows are revered on Thai Pongal by adorning them with necklaces. Today we decorated a puppet cow with beaded necklaces and also the children pretended to be cows as I placed necklaces around their necks!

3.) During Thai Pongal, beautiful designs are made in the home on the floor and doorsteps with colored rice or chalk, or other materials. The elaborate designs are called "kolam." Traditionally, these designs are made only by women but today we all gave it a try and also got a wonderful opportunity to talk about geometry and shapes. SO much fun!

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR CHILD

1. What animal wears a necklace during Thai Pongal? Cows!

2) What bubbles over in the pot during Thai Pongal celebrations? Rice and milk!

Week of January 13th, 2014

HAPPY THAI PONGAL DAY!

Thai Pongal Day, celebrated on January 14th each year in Sri Lanka, was our culture focus for 

the month!

This annual festival is a celebration of prosperity (traditionally by farmers) and includes gratitude for the sun, natural elements, cows and the staple food: rice! We learned all about where Sri Lanka was on the globe, and also how people celebrated Thai Pongal day.  

We did this through some fun play acting! The picture above are from a group of children in the fours class who were proud to be in the "cattle herd"! Their cattle herder adorned them with beaded necklaces as part of the Thai Pongal celebration (a part of tradition) while other children were cooking pretend pots of rice and milk (our rice was cotton balls!), making floor designs (another element of celebration) and also painting around the house and fixing things up! We did this with plain paintbrushes and pretended.

The kids absolutely loved this play acting, and we took turns participating in the various activities.  I also sang the children a traditional Sri Lankan nursery rhyme about a little duck, entitled "Mage Podi Thara". Listen to the MP3 here:

MAGE PODI THARA (MP3 download)

Also don't miss the cute video of our four year olds recapping the information we had learned in class. Reviewing is an essential part of our learning process! (See your at home review questions 

below as well!)

REVIEW QUESTIONS ABOUT THAI PONGAL DAY:

1.) What do they cook and eat during the Thai Pongal celebration? (Pots of boiled rice and milk!)

2.) What animal wears a necklace during Thai Pongal? (The cow!)

3.) What do people make on the floor during Thai Pongal? (Colorful designs!)