Saturday, September 14, 2013

Q es de Quetzal

While Chiquita's literal Hispanic heritage comes from Peru, as her mom I want to add a little of my love for the Guatemalan people into her experiences.  A while back we read "People of the Corn", a picture book about Mayan culture and did a corn craft.  When I bought that book I also bought "Guatemala ABCs" by Marcie Aboff and I'd been meaning to do a craft to go along with the book (we've read it several times) but hadn't gotten to it yet.

Since we'd reached Q in our Bilingual alphabet series it was the perfect time!  Spanish has a lot more Q words than English, but quetzal was an ideal craft.  The quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and shares it's name with Guatemala's currency.  The bird has been hunted for it's beautiful long tail feathers and is very rare, living in the northern region of Coban.  Though I've never seen a real live quetzal, it's image is pervasive in Guatemala.

While Chiquita was flipping through the Guatemala ABC book, I cut out the pieces for our quetzal.  I cut out a capital Q for the body and a lower case q for the head (they have small heads) from green.  From red I made a half circle the same size as the capital Q for the belly.  Two long crescent-shaped tail feathers from green and a little orange triangle beak completed the quetzal.

I sat down with Chiquita and we looked at the map in the book and talked about where Guatemala is in relation to where we live, and Peru, where Papapa lives and even Frances where the primas (cousins) live.  Then we looked at the Q is for Quetzal page and Chiquita helped find the big and little q-s on the page.

Then I showed her the cut-out quetzal, disassembled it and compared the q-s to the ones in the book.  Chiquita (with my help), glued together the quetzal bird and added a googly eye to finish it!




5 comments:

  1. So awesome! That "Guatemala ABCs" book looks really cool too. :)

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  2. I wanted to invite you to the Friday Flash Blog Party, the best linky in town! I hope you'll join us and link up. Who knows. You may just get highlighted!

    The party goes on through Monday.

    Jennifer @ The Jenny Evolution
    www.thejennyevolution.com

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  3. I was just checking out all your alphabet crafts and they are amazing! I was looking all around the web for ideas to make crafts with the vowels and couldn't find anything so I just made our owns. They are just waiting for my little one to get back from school to make them and will post later. Thanks for sharing yours....they will save me time next time we'll be studying the consonants!

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    1. Awesome! You should check out another great alphabet round up I'm participating in http://alldonemonkey.com/31-days-of-abcs/ It just started today and each day they'll do a link-up for crafts and activities with a different letter. I'm hosting letter T.

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  4. I was always fascinated with the quetzal, so I love this! Great idea to use the capital Q as the body, and that book looks fantastic. What a great way to share your love for the country and people. Thanks for linking up to the Creative Kids Culture Blog Hop!

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