Matilda's school has been inviting parents to come in the past week to share about their culture. Any culture Tim & I actually have real blood-line heritage tie to was well covered by other parents who've much more recently emigrated. The teachers enthusiastically encouraged people to come in and share any country really; since we've had a fair amount of Indian influence in our lives (my visit there in '95, years of tutorage from Gaurav's, and Matilda's numerous fancy Indian dresses) I decided to share that.
With not very much effort, I was able to pull together quite a bunch of fun things to contribute. I found some fun, free printable coloring pages at this website. Matilda wore one of her traditional Indian outfits from Sarah and Gaurav, and we brought a whole bunch of fancy embroidered dresses for the dress up corner. Tim dug up his Bollywood music hits cd and the teachers had Matilda do an impromptu dance. She looked perplexed by the request momentarily, but then danced right along so cute.
Since food is my forte, of course I got all sorts of fun things for the kids to try and really regret not taking pictures of the snack plates. It was awesome to see 20 little cute plates lined up with tiny snack portions on them. I made mango lassi, but bought everything else from our local Indian grocery store/deli where we got naan, rasgulla, pakora, mango juice, and candied fennel seeds. The runaway hit was the candied fennel seeds with all but one kid trying them!
For the outside time I brought along chalk and flour to do traditional decorative floor drawings, rangoli. The idea was to draw a design and then fill it in with flour. The kids briefly drew with chalk and then it turned into a flour-bomb-dust-bowl. It was spectacularly fun, here's M sitting in the flour chaos laughing at her buddy.
Porter was thrilled with it all because he finally got to stay at school and get his fill of the fire trucks and digging out back in the sand box.
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