Hello Korea!

Stop number 3 on our Library World Tour is South Korea. I have to say that I couldn't find any of the recommended books for Korea in our library, and the ones I found on Amazon were suspiciously absent as well. In fact, my local library was woefully understocked in children's books about Korea in general. I did manage to find this one (above) at the larger Metro library. I like the story of the little girl moving from Korea to the U.S. and thought it did a nice job conveying the differences and similarities between the two. There were other books on Amazon that looked better, but this one did the job and was free -- so I am trying not to pout about it. It's a lovely book, but I'm annoyed by the scarcity of choice.

We also picked up Bee-bim Bop from our library, which is geared for much younger children, but which I thought could work in the context of seeing how the food was cooked and the people ate. I love that the family says grace before their meal -- it really highlights the fact that one of the largest faith groups in Korea is actually Presbyterianism.

To enrich this lesson, we are going to use the recipe for Bee-bim Bop at the back of the book. We'll track how far away Korea is from our town on our graph and find Korea on our world map. I have to say, there aren't a ton of kid-friendly resources that I could locate on the web; most of the stuff was aimed at older children writing reports for school. My baby will do a Letter K coloring sheet and my son will copy some sentences about Korea for handwriting.

Next Stop: Vietnam