Babel School in Taiwan

Our very comfortable hotel - East Hotel. Instead of staying home for Christmas we decided to fly for three days to Hong Kong. It was my and kids first time on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. The city didn't really impress us much ... but we still had a great time. Views from the airport bus to the hotel - far from pretty. We not only walked around the city, but also took all possible means of public transportation - bus, tram, taxi, small bus, boat, underground and train (all of us agree that the taxi was the worst). It was very convenient with the Octopus card. Doubledecker tram, Tim on a ferry and plan of MTR.   We tried some local food and drinks. What is "Milk water egg"? Condensed milk diluted with water with a raw egg inside - quite nice. The drinks very really good and the jelly eggs were fun to eat too. Jas loves LEGO so we couldn't miss a visit to the Times Square where big Lego figures and houses were set out. What surprised

Last year we were away from home for the whole Christmas season, so there was no reason to decorate the house or to put the Christmas tree up. This year, we are spending most of December at home, so we wanted to have the house all ready for the Holidays. We invited our homeschooling neighbours for an afternoon of making dough ornaments.     This is how they turned out. Kids also made origami and Hama Beads ornaments. We've also put out the old and new decorations, mangers and ornaments. And of course a very colorful Christmas tree! Zosia made some cute sweets from marzipan and Jas made and decorated cookies.

Zosia sharing her experience at the camp. During summer Zosia participated in a few summer camps organized by Fubong Culture and Education Foundation 富邦文教基金會. For one of the camps she went to Orchid Island 蘭嶼 off the south eastern coast of Taiwan to learn about the aboriginal way of life. At the end of the camp kids had to make a short film presentation about what they have learned. Another camp was in Tainan, where she explored the newly opened National Museum of Taiwan History 國立台灣歷史博物館 . During this camp she not only learned history of Taiwan, but also made a short feature film about one event from the history using the photos taken inside the museum. Images from "The Kite" animation For the last camp Zosia gathered a group of eight homeschoolers interested in film making and together they signed up for the film making camp. After a few days of learning about acting, working as a group and preparing a script for their movie only half of the groups w

December 6th was St. Nicholas Day. It is a tradition that on that day kids in Poland receive small gifts, usually sweets and chocolates, put under their beds at night by the Good Old St Nick. This year St Nick was a bit busy and didn't get here on time, he was late by two days. He also thought that instead of stuffing the kids's tummies with more sweets it would be better to "stuff" their brains with some literature.  Kids also wrote letters to Święty Mikołaj, as we call Santa in Polish.  Jas even left a snack for tired Santa and carrots for Rudolph.

Zosia has just finished reading (and studying) The Usborne Encyclopedia of Planet Earth . Everything that a teenager should know about our Earth - climate, plants and animals, land shapes, rivers and oceans, the planet itself, earthquakes and volcanoes - can be found in this book. In addition to that Usborne Quicklinks's website has many links to different interesting and fun websites explaining even more in depth these issues. As a last exercise from this book, Zosia has created a mindmap about different map projections. Here it is: