Food from Central America and beyond to make at home with your family. Turn on the radio to a Spanish station, and have fun! Note that the recipes are ordered alphabetically by country.
GUATEMALA: Thousands of Catholics in Antigua, Guatemala join together during Lent each year to make colored sawdust carpets in preparation for Semana Santa, or Holy Week. In 2014, they broke the Guinness Book of World Records and made the longest sawdust carpet ever, at an astounding 6,600 feet.
Watch the video below and be amazed! It is a beautiful end result, but requires much patience and attention to detail! This SITE also has more stencils and ideas.
In class, we used chalk to create our own enormous “sawdust carpet” for Easter outside in the school courtyard. We took our time to make it beautiful and talked a lot about paciencia (patience). I outlined a huge design, and then students colored it in, while listening to Spanish songs on my Bluetooth speaker and asking, “¿Dónde está la tiza azul?” (Where is the blue chalk?), etc.
Most recently, it was too hot outside, so we stayed inside and sorted and organized Fruit Loops by color, crushed them to create an edible powder, and then sprinkled the powder into patterns onto small pieces of chocolate cake with frosting (as a treat to end a very successful academic year). I based the edible sand art lesson off of this blog idea. As an alternative, you could also sprinkle and glue the powder to already printed out paper designs, or simply arrange the Fruit Loops in patterns without pulverizing them. Either way, it is great fun!
This video shows what the process looks like (note: there is no sound).
This year, every student in Lower School made his or her own miniature carpet with colored sand. For younger classes, a pattern was assigned; older students created their own designs. The end goal was to laminate all of them together into one very long “carpet”, which we did!
GUATEMALA: These tiny Worry Dolls are from Guatemala. Children make them and put them under their pillows at night to take away their worries (e.g., monsters, nightmares).
Students were fascinated by these. They took a day to glue small pieces of fabric to mini Popsicle sticks, added a face, and soon afterwards, had their very own Worry Dolls. This Silly Billy video story below is a great introduction. Aside: Adults make Worry Dolls, too!
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