Country Study: Australia

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After doing South Korea it was my son’s turn to decide what country to do next. He chose to do Australia. Did you know that Australia is the only country that is also a continent? I learned on facebook today that not all people know this which TOTALLY shocked me. 🙂

Anyways, Australia has often fascinated us so it was rather neat to spend some time learning about this country. My son did a report on it. We learned that Australia had a gold rush and started as a penal colony. He learned a few other things as well but his report has gone the way of the dodo bird when we wiped my old laptop clean for him to use. He also did up a map of Australia, figuring out the important cities and landmarks (like the Great Barrier Reef and Ayers Rock).

We Watched:

As always we watched a fair number of videos because videos show us things that we can’t always appreciate reading a book (and frankly my boy is a video oriented lad).

This video gave us a good introduction to Australia and gave us information to consider and look further into.

Did you know that the official name of Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia. This was news to us as well, but then again, Canada is called the Dominion of Canada (but we don’t say that eh?)

We went on to learn more about Ayer’s Rock, also known as Uluru.

We watched a couple longer videos on the Great Barrier Reef, but thought a shorter one linked on the blog would be more suitable. 🙂

We checked out tourist destinations as well, because in many ways we are tourists…just doing it via videos rather than a long plane trip. 🙂

Saw some of their wildlife, and learned about their climate. We tend not to like background music for our videos, but we couldn’t escape it on this video. We found this site on animal conservancy interesting.

I could go on and on about all we learned… but I need to leave room for you to explore this interesting land on your own too eh? 🙂

Oh! I mustn’t forget. We did some art! Just some simple dot art. It was kinda fun though. We learned all about it here. As well as through Geography Through Art.

We Cooked:

Oh.. and we cooked (don’t we always?) 🙂 And oh my goodness we made good food. The only thing we don’t mind not making again was the ribs as they were good but nothing better than what we’ve made before. The spinach damper was excellent and worked well dipped in spaghetti sauce! The rosemary butter was excellent and I’ll be making that again when I have biscuits on the table. The lamb rolls were easy enough to make and I hope to make them when I have guests sometime. They were excellent fodder!

We made aussie ribs, spinach damper, lamb rolls, and….

My son made cherry pavlova on his own. Very sweet, tasted great, especially when frozen. We all initially had a slice and then decided it would be better a bit colder. 🙂 I admittedly did help my lad with the meringue as it needed to be done ahead of time and he was busy writing a report.