Morocco

Xavier's favorite part:  Building a casbah with "cannons pointing towards the ocean". The big green duplo blocks sticking out at the top are the cannons.

Cole's favorite part:  The reading, such as

The Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354 by James Rumford.  Ibn Battuta was a kind of Moroccan Marco Polo.  I especially liked the author's talent in crafting such phrases such as "Traveling: first it leaves you speechless, then it makes you a storyteller,"  and "Traveling:  first it makes you a stranger, then it brings you new friends."  Those may not be the exact quotes as we returned the library books before I finished this post. :-)

and

The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust by Karen Gray Ruelle and Deborah Durland DeSaix.  We learned from this book that the rector of the Parisian Mosque at this time was Si Kaddour Benghabrit, an Algerian, who had also been a high ranking diplomat in Morocco.  The mosque was built in 1926 when Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were under French rule.



Evan's favorite part: creating hamsa. Hamsa is the Arabic word for five, and also for these "good luck charms" popular in Morocco (and elsewhere.) 

Cole's hamsa from a piece of Altair Design paper

Xavier's hamsa

Evan's brightly colored hamsa

It was also a treat to look at the online photo album of a middle school friend of mine who has done a lot of traveling, including Morocco.  I love Google image search, but there is something nice about knowing from where the photos came.  Though it wasn't in her Morocco album, one of the first pictures we stumbled on was a photo of a hamsa that she had sent as a gift to someone else.  Fun!