It was a fortunate coincidence that the festival of Diwali fell during this unit. We probably would have celebrated it anyway, but now we had the stamp of authenticity. :) One of the most fun things we did was drawing these rangoli on our front walk (a sign of welcome to guests and to the goddess who visits). I've never really been a fan of sidewalk chalk, but maybe I've never had any that was good before? Not that this was anything special (it was Crayola) but it seemed softer and more colorful than the stuff I've used before. We spent all morning perfecting our geometric designs. There are some amazing pictures of real rangoli---it's such a cool art form. Ours were definitely basic, but still quite beautiful, we thought :)
Daisy's is the Taj Mahal, I think.
Seb made this amazing peacock that took up two whole sidewalk portions.
The eyes on his feathers were so beautiful!
The final results were very festive!
And that night when we had candles lighting up all our rangoli, it was even prettier. We loved it! The boys were SO excited for Sam to come home and see how lovely everything looked.
For our celebration, we cleaned the house (as they do in India! We didn't whitewash anything though) and lit candles everywhere. We made naan and coconut dal (I don't have the recipe written up yet, but here is another good one) and mango lassi for dinner, and it was all QUITE delicious. We ate by candlelight and then watched "The Jungle Book" afterwards. Fun!
Links we used:
http://www.indiavideo.org/
http://www.activityvillage.co.
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