At the beginning of the school year, each participating family chooses a country to study. Some families choose a country they want to learn more about, while other pick something from their normal course of study. The coordinator keeps a list of which country each family has chosen so that there is a good variety.

We were studying Ancient China this year, so we chose that as our focus for the International Festival. We had lots of fun learning about Chinese inventions, making homemade paper, doing calligraphy, visiting the High Museum of Art to see the Terra Cotta Warriors of Xi Huang Di, learning to use chopsticks and studying China’s geography and climate. We displayed the children’s hands-on work as well as the papers they wrote on a large tri-fold board.

Our oldest son wrote a paper on Chinese inventions, our third grader wrote about the Great Wall of China and our first grader wrote about the Terra Cotta Warriors. The children also made a large salt-dough map of China to put on the table in front of our display board.

One of the best parts of the festival is the food! Each family is responsible to bring an item or two of food from their chosen country. We brought fried rice and fortune cookies. We tried so many fabulous dishes tonight.

During the festival, children participate in a scavenger hunt. About a week before International night, families submit two questions (one easy, one difficult) which can be answered from their display board. The coordinator compiles them into two scavenger hunts, one for younger kids and one for older ones. The kids have a great time going around to all the displays, and they learn so much from each one as they hunt for the needed answers.

This game makes sure the kids not only do a good job learning about their own chosen country, but that they also learn something about all the other countries presented. If they finish their scavenger hunt, they can submit their name for door prize drawings. This year’s door prizes were all food items from different countries. Our family won Belgian chocolates, Dutch Stroopwaffel cookies, Korean shrimp-flavored chips and Norwegian ginger cookies.

After the scavenger hunt and feast are over, families can share presentations if they want to. Our oldest son played a Chinese song on the piano, and other children played violin or sang a song in their chosen language.

One family did a Powerpoint presentation on Mexico, sharing lots of photos and teaching some phrases in Spanish along the way. Some children wear costumes and others come as they are. The festival is all about having fun and sharing what we’ve learned with each other.

At the end of the evening, the festival coordinator taught three large group dances. She had appropriate music to go with each dance.

Our children loved the Filipino dance they learned, which was a bit like “the jaws of death”. Two adults slide bamboo poles together and then apart in rhytym to the music. The children needed to try and jump between the poles when they were open and jump out of the poles before they came back together.

You might consider holding an International Festival! It is a great opportunity for kids to display what they have been working on, and a fun way to for them to learn about other countries.

I made Chinese fried rice tonight for our International Festival. This dish is so easy and so yummy that I make it frequently for lunch or dinner. It is a great way to use up leftover rice.

Ingredients:
vegetable oil
1 large onion, diced
two or three cloves of garlic, minced
Cooked White rice (I start with 3 cups uncooked rice to make a large batch)
Frozen peas and carrots (or other vegetable, according to taste)
Soy sauce
3 or 4 eggs
Cooked chicken (or other meat, according to taste)

Prepare your ingredients first. Pour some soy sauce onto the meat and let it marinate while you get everything else ready. Dice the onion. Stir the eggs with a fork to break up the yolks. Cook the rice if you have not done so already.

Pour a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil into the bottom of a deep, heavy-bottomed skillet or wok. Add the diced onion. When the onion begins to brown, add the garlic. Cook for one minute and add the frozen peas and carrots. Fry until heated through.

If you are working with large quantities, transfer the vegetables to a separate bowl before adding the meat to the skillet. Add more oil if necessary and fry the meat until heated through. Transfer the meat to the bowl with the vegetables. Add 2 or 3 more tablespoons of oil and allow it to heat up. Add the cooked rice. It is important to have a big enough skillet (or to transfer cooked ingredients if you don’t) so that the rice fries instead of steams.

Be careful! I make fried rice all the time, but last night I let the oil get too hot before adding the rice. Oil was spattering and popping everywhere and some landed on the burner and caught on fire! Thankfully, I remembered that you put small oil out fires with a towel, NOT with water.

Fry the rice for a couple of minutes. Push it to the sides with a spatula and add the egg. Allow the egg to scramble and mix it throughout the rice. Add the vegetables and meat back to the rice pan, stirring well. Add soy sauce to taste.

If you need to make this for a crowd, it can be done the night before and then warmed up the next day in a crock pot.

You can also use raw vegetables or raw meat, but you need to adjust the cooking time.

This did not fit my definition of cheap and easy, so we experimented and found a couple of ways that worked just fine, as long as you don’t require a perfectly square result. Even if you did, you could always trim the edges with an Exacto knife!

This activity is great to do outdoors, as it can be a bit messy. I am putting a second option at the bottom of this post, for those who want to go even cheaper and even easier and skip purchasing screen or using any real paper at all!

Here is what you will need:

Window screen (I bought the cheapest, and paid about $6 for an entire roll)
scissors
scraps of torn paper (paper towels, kleenex, cardstock, computer paper, index cards, construction paper, newspaper, magazines)
a blender
a rolling pin
water
some towels
a sponge
a mixing bowl
a bin slightly larger than the dimensions of the finished paper
embellishments, if you prefer, such as glitter or leaves

Step One:

I gave each child a 5 quart ice cream bucket and laid out a stack of different kinds of paper. Each child took whatever paper he wanted and tore it into shreds. I asked them to tear up about 4 to 6 cups of paper each, or about half a bucket full. This yielded about 2 or 3 pieces of finished paper per child.

While the kids are shredding paper, have an adult cut several squares of screen (about 3 or 4 per child). The screen should be the size you want your paper to end up. My squares were a little less than 8″ x 11″. I did not bother to measure, just eyeballed it. I purchased the cheapest screen, which was made of aluminum. The edges were a bit sharp when cut, so tell the children to be careful. It was definitely sharp enough to scratch skin. For a little more money you could buy nylon screen.

Step Two:

Add enough water to cover the paper.

Before blending

Step Three:

We tried a method that did not require a blender, but it seemed like it was taking a very long time for the paper to really turn into pulp. We decided to use the blender after all.

I poured one bucket of pulp into the blender and pulsed on liquify a few times until it was the consistency of very thick oatmeal. This took seconds, as opposed to the hours it may have taken without…and I am not convinced it would ever have become the right consistency on its own!

After a few pulses in the blender

Step Four:

Pour the thick pulp into the bin where the paper will be made. I used a square bin that normally holds toys. A baby bathtub would do, or a dishpan…anything that is slightly larger than the paper will be when finished.

Step Five:

Add enough water to get the mixture to the consistency of thin oatmeal…about 2 parts water to one part pulp. This is called a slurry.

Mix the slurry around a bit with your hands.

Step Six:

Dip a piece of screen into the slurry mixture. Swirl it around until you have a layer of pulp on the screen. You can scoop some on with your hands if you need to.

Then pull the screen up out of the water, letting all the water drain off while keeping the pulp on the screen.

This would be a bit easier with a deckle, but more expensive. And making the deckle is much more difficult than just doing without.

All in all, we did not find it very difficult at all to lift the flexible screen and drain the water without dumping the pulp.

Step Seven:

After you’ve drained off most of the water, lay the square of screen on a folded towel. If you want to add embellishments, such as leaves, do so now. Press the leaves into the pulp. You may need to scoop up a bit of extra pulp and press gently around the leaf to cement it in place. My children chose to embellish their paper with printed soldiers from Junior General. I tore out the soldiers and soaked them for a few seconds in the slurry before pressing them into the pulp on the screen.

Step Eight:

Cover the pulp with another piece of screen. Press down on the top screen with a sponge to absorb more water. Wring the sponge out as needed until much of the water is absorbed.

Step Nine:

Cover the top screen with a second towel. Roll back and forth over the towel with a rolling pin in order to extract even more water.

Step Ten:

Remove the top towel. Pick up the two screens, with the pulp in between, and flip it over. Remove the top screen and lay the paper out to dry on the bottom screen, preferably in the sun if it is a nice day.

OPTION #2: If you don’t have any screen, or you don’t want to use a blender

We tried another recipe from Bella Online. She suggested using dryer lint and a deckle made from a plastic lid. The dryer lint was simple to use and did not require the aid of a blender…but we thought it was a bit gross, as our dryer lint seems to have lots of hair mixed in, LOL, which you could see in the finished paper.

The plastic lid worked great, though. I took the lid of a 5 gallon ice cream bucket and poked a bunch of holes in it.

Stick it into the slurry (just like the instructions for using a screen) and slide it around until it is covered with pulp. Pull it out of the water and drain off as much as you can.

You can then cover it with a screen and proceed with step 8. If you chose not to purchase any screen at all, I think you could easily use this method with a butter tub lid or ice cream container lid and some towels. Just drain as much water as possible from the lid, and use the towel and rolling pin method to extract the rest of the water. Turn the paper out of the lid gently to dry. I had to start peeling at the edge, but after that it came off easily.