WWII Week: Germany

For our second World War II Country, we were on to Germany. 

First up, we talked about Adolf Hilter, and his rise to power, along with the Holocaust and the Nazi Party. Honestly, I think most of you reading have a basic understanding of WWII, and I'm three countries behind, so I'm going to skip the history lesson and keep on keepin on. 

But Mussolini also made an appearance in our timeline of events today, because of his 1939 invading of Ethiopia, and the Pact of Steel he made with Hitler. 

The boys then added to their lapbooks with a sheet on Nazi Germany. 

Then we were on to learning about Germany as a country. Again, I'm sort of phoning these in. We've been here before for various projects, and one of our interesting facts in our book was about the printing press, Johann Gutenberg and the Gutenberg Bible. The Library of Congress has one of the three copies printed on vellum, a thin animal skin parchment, and we've seen it.  

Our landmark was a bit of a spoiler alert, but we did discuss the Berlin Wall. Of course, the boys are fully aware of the 'Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!' line from Ronald Reagan, and as such, have been taught about the Berlin Wall before.

We also talked about Oktoberfest, castles, 1,200 different types of sausages, and Land der Dichters und Denkers (The land of writers and thinkers). We even got to talk the Brother's Grimm. 

I don't usually mention our dinner music, but we do try and listen to something from every country at dinner. Sometimes we forget, and sometimes the music is really um... different. But Germany was easy, they are the home of Bach and Beethoven. The boys weren't really fans, though. 

Calib's Deutschland card featured beer, sausage and some cars on the autobhan. He talks a big game about how cool it would be to drive as fast as you want (in some areas at least), but he freaks out if he hits 30 mph. 

Peyton meanwhile put Ronald Reagan on his card, and crossed out both 'East' and 'West', and just left Germany. 

And I don't know why, but I really loved Hayden's German guy climbing the mountain with a beer in his hand. 

Taking some help from the store this week, because we finally can. I mean, good luck finding any 'Product of Equatorial Guinea' foods in your local international section. But actually at one of our Publix's they have a whole German section. We picked up some Bavarian mustard, celery slaw, Spatzle, German cherries, and some interesting (and hard to chew!) fruit snacks. 

We used the Bavarian mustard on our Beer Bratwurst and Onions (fun fact: We had it on National Beer Day!), the spatzle for the Oma's German Cheese Spatzle, and the cherries to make a desert that wasn't exactly German, but close enough that we went with it: Simple Cherry Amaretto Crumble.

Dinner earned five spoons up. 

The Spatzle was even eaten in leftover form, and we all gave the Bavarian mustard a big thumbs up! The slaw got mixed reviews, as did the fruit snacks (they were just too hard!). 

But the desert was a hit. Not Malva cake big, or even Welsh cake big, but we did enjoy it. 

For our activity we played Topfschlagen, a game usually reserved for small kids in German, but whatever, it looked fun enough for teenagers in America. All you need is a blindfold, a wooden spoon, a pot and some present or candy or prize of sorts. (Ours were some German cookies!) 

Basically you have someone put on the blindfold, then put the pot somewhere in the room with the prize underneath, and they have to find it by hitting their wooden spoon around. At first everyone did it all on their own. I told them that seemed safer then all of them blindly crawling across the floor slamming wooden spoons around. 

But they decided they could handle all three of them going at once, so we tried that too. Peyton won once, and Calib and Hayden just about tied once. 

And we also discovered Ellie really thinks wooden spoons are a toy for her. 

Peyton colored in Germany for us. 

That's 55 down, 138 to go!