Reggio Emilia Wednesday: Bahamas Blast!

We are going to the Bahamas in the near future, so to prep Big Bro and Little Bro for our trip, we have started to do some work about The Bahamas.
We have learned about the food, clothing, customs, sea and land animals, homes, restaurants and shops of The Bahamas.
What was really neat was to learn about an interesting holiday called Junkanoo. Junkanoo starts on December 26th. It involves a big parade and wearing ornate masks. The holiday has African roots, and originally coincided with Christmas but was moved to be on Boxing Day instead of Christmas. Sometimes, the celebrations go on well into the first week of January.
Both Big Bro and Little Bro made Junkanoo inspired masks, sans the feathers as feathers make us a bit sneezy here. They had such a fun time making these scary masks.
Mask making seems like it is going to morph into a long range Reggio Emilia inspired project about masks, as making the masks and learning about them seemed to really pique the interests of both Big Bro and Little Bro.
We have other masks in our Montessori inspired continents boxes from Italy, England, South Korea, and The Bahamas so it has some real potential to develop into more than just a one day Junkanoo mask project.  Discussing how emotions are portrayed on masks was very interesting to the boys. They also liked looking at how ornate the various masks were, as well as how the masks were pretty symmetrical...so this should be a fun start to an ongoing mask project here in the Sunshine State.

Dear Hubby helped me to format some three part cards and a bingo game of sorts all about The Bahamas.
Here are some photos of our Bahamas inspired work:

Big Bro working on making his Junkanoo mask.

Big Bro adding some detail to his mask...

Little Bro making his mask and imitating the look on his mask.

Big Bro's scary Junkanoo mask. All Junkanoo masks tend to look a little scary.

A little twist on three part cards....at Big Bro's request, we made an extra set of the cards and laminated them as "gameboards" so that we could play Bahamas Bingo for Family Game Night.

One of the picture cards for our Bahamas three part cards. This is the flag of The Bahamas.

Little Bro and Big Bro sporting their Junkanoo masks. Mask making was such a cool project! This is the spring board for more mask making fun, to be certain!

In addition to a long range Reggio Emilia inspired mask making project, we are also going to make some  snacks inspired by The Bahamas for this week, include some made of plantains and coconut. Yummy and fun!

Getting closer and closer for the real Bahamas experience...hope we will be able to pick up some real Junkanoo masks when we go there.

What are you doing in your classroom or homeschool this week?

Any long term Reggio Emilia inspired projects?

How are you integrating Montessori and Reggio Emilia in your home or classroom?

Any cool Reggio Emilia inspired projects you have discovered and think should be linked up here?

Please link up if you have something that you would like to share: