Raksha Bandan

This week is one of my favorite holidays.  There are Mother's Day and Father's Day to celebrate parents and Grandparents' Day to celebrate grandparents but this is an Indian holiday celebrating the bond between siblings.  Traditionally, sisters create a bracelet for their brothers and small trinkets and sweets are exchanged.

We celebrated by finding India on a map and looking at images of India.  We made bracelets, one for Genevieve and one for Tobias (which he turned into a shaker).  We read some books about siblings like Brothers, which is about Chinese immigrants in 19th century San Francisco.  The youngest brother befriends an Irish boy and they help the older brothers turn the ramshackle store into a successful business able to cater to both the Chinese in China Town and others living in the area.  We read Tikki Tikki Tembo, which has beautiful pictures and is a story about favoritism and how it may backfire.  My Little Brother and Babies Can't Eat Kimchee talk about some of the things little siblings can't do, but how we can still have fun and look forward to the things we can do with them as they get older.

We finished our animal alphabet book, as there are a lot fewer animals towards the end of the alphabet.  X is especially challenging, but we found a picture of a xenops.  We also had friends over for another art day.  This time we played with glitter glue, scratch boards, and rainbow sand with sticky boards.