Discovering Peru with Kids

I love participating in Multicultural Kid Blogs Global Learning for Kids Series. It gives us as an opportunity as a familia to research, and learn about another country.

This month’s country is Peru.

We’re thrilled to learn about Peru. A beautiful country in South America, surrounded by Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile.

Official name is Republic of Peru with a Constitutional republic government. The capital is Lima, and it has a population of 30,147,935. The official languages are Spanish, and Quechua. Currency is Nuevo Sol, and the country is well known for it’s Andes mountain range.

The people of Peru are a mix of many different cultures, including Indians, Spaniards and other Europeans, descendants of African slaves, and Asians.

As an introduction to the music we listened to Daria’s Cancioncitas De Los Andes / Little Songs of the Andes. Music in as excellent way to expose children to another culture. Luckily for me, during last year’s visit to the International Festival I purchased a Peruvian ocarina, and a gourd ornament. Little one enjoyed playing the Peruvian ocarina an ancient musical instrument.

Multicultural toys are hard to come by but are a wonderful resource to introduce your child to a country’s culture. I totally scored big time when I was able to purchase these adorable animal finger puppets from Daria’s Little Village Store. These are finger puppets hand crocheted by women artisans in Peru. Little one played with them for hours on end, and it gave us an opportunity to learn about the animals in Peru.

Now the most exciting part on learning about Peru was making Pollo a la Brasa! It’s a Peruvian-style roast chicken. So yummy, and delish! I used the recipe found here, but instead of roasting a whole chicken marinated pieces of chicken breast, thighs, and legs. We let the chicken sit in the marinade for 24 hours, and popped it in the oven the following day. I must say the aroma was heavenly, and delicious!

After dinner, we watched this short video “Introduction to Peru.”