Homeschool Together Pod · Little Learn Club
Ecuador
Ecuador is the country named after the Equator. Over two weeks your child will read two beautiful books, get to know four animals well enough to explain them to you, and make one thing out of something that was going to be thrown away — to give away here, in our own neighborhood.
Two weeks · Wednesdays and Thursdays · 10:00 to 2:00
What these two weeks cover
- Geography — the Equator, the four regions of Ecuador, and finding a country on a real map.
- Reading — two read-alouds all the way through, with real questions about the books themselves.
- Science — habitat, adaptation, seed dispersal and extinction, using the same words their science curriculum already uses.
- Writing — observation, explaining how something works, and one real opinion with reasons.
- Spanish — words said out loud every session, plus a few in Kichwa, a language spoken in Ecuador long before Spanish.
- Art — watercolor one Thursday, Andean folk painting the next. Both are real techniques, not crafts.
- And the part they will remember — a minga, an Andean tradition where a whole community works together on one job, unpaid, because the work belongs to everyone. Ours happens on the last day.
Our day
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Arrival and free play |
| 10:30 – 11:15 | Block 1 — read-aloud, all together |
| 11:15 – 11:30 | Snack and break |
| 11:30 – 12:15 | Block 2 — hands and pencils |
| 12:15 – 1:15 | Lunch and free play |
| 1:15 – 2:00 | Enrichment |
| 2:00 | Goodbye |
Week 1 — The country and the rainforest
What to bring this week
- World Journal and a glue stick, both days. We glue something into the sketchbook in almost every session.
- Colored pencils or crayons in a bag with their name on it. There is a lot of coloring this week and sharing slows the table down.
- An old shirt or smock for Thursday — we paint with watercolor in the afternoon.
- Message me about any allergies, this week and not next. We taste shrimp ceviche and brazil nuts on the last day, and I will have something else ready. Nobody sits out.
Wednesday — Let’s visit Ecuador
- Find Ecuador on the map, and work out why a country would be named after the Equator.
- The four regions: the Pacific coast, the Andes volcanoes, the Amazon rainforest, and the Galápagos Islands — 600 miles out at sea.
- Watch baby marine iguanas run the gauntlet of snakes on a Galápagos beach. They will ask to see it twice.
- Color the flag and the country, then cut and glue the four region cards into the sketchbook.
Afternoon — entrepreneurship: who is an entrepreneur, and a hunt for toy brands from nine different countries. The youngest work on colors and sorting at their own table.
Thursday — The rainforest
- Read Tuki and Moka: A Tale of Two Tamarins — a boy in the Ecuadorian rainforest who gathers brazil nuts with his father and saves two monkeys from traffickers.
- The agouti game: each child hides six nuts, then may only fetch four back. The two they forget become trees. That is how the forest actually works.
- Color and glue in the golden-mantled tamarin card, and write down where it lives and what it eats.
Afternoon — art: watercolor. Each child glues one animal they colored onto watercolor paper and paints only the world around it.
Your job this week
- Wednesday, at the map: ask your child one question you do not know the answer to — and do not look it up. Write it down instead.
- Thursday, after the book: the children will disagree about whether Eduardo should have gone for help instead of taking on the traffickers alone. Do not settle it. Say “you two disagree” and move on. They write about it next week, and it works far better unresolved.
Week 2 — The islands and the minga
What to bring this week
- One clean thing that was going to be thrown away, by Thursday — a glass jar, a tin, a shell, a seed pod, sticks, a cardboard tube. This is the material for our minga, so it matters that it really was headed for the trash.
- World Journal and glue stick again, both days.
- The old shirt again for Thursday. Tempera this time, and it is the messier of the two weeks.
Wednesday — The Galápagos
- Read We’re Sailing to Galapagos, and look closely at what the children in it are wearing and why.
- Three dates on the board: 1535, a storm blows a ship off course and the islands are found by accident. 1570, they are named for the giant tortoises. 1835, Darwin arrives.
- Lonesome George — the last Pinta Island tortoise, who died in 2012. A whole kind of animal ended with one animal. The room usually goes quiet.
- Three more animal cards: the giant tortoise, the blue-footed booby, and the frigatebird whose throat pouch inflates to the size of a football.
Afternoon — entrepreneurship: where ideas come from, including the three most famous accidents — Play-Doh, Post-its, and the popsicle, invented by an eleven-year-old.
Thursday — Nature’s bounty, and our minga
- Taste Ecuador: shrimp ceviche with plantain chips, and brazil nuts — the same nuts Eduardo gathers in the book.
- Who picked them: casteñeros, families who earn a living from a forest that gets to stay standing.
- Our minga. Each child makes one thing out of what they brought — the part that was going to be thrown away — the way Eduardo’s grandmother carves the empty nut pods into something beautiful.
- Then we give them away together, in one trip, with a card in each child’s own handwriting. Nothing is sold. That is the difference between a market and a minga.
Afternoon — art: Tigua painting, a real folk art from a village high between two volcanoes. Bright color on a round drumhead, filled edge to edge.
Your job this week
- Wednesday, after the film: when Lonesome George’s story ends, the room will go silent. Do not rescue the silence. Count to ten in your head before anyone speaks.
- Thursday, in the minga: your job is to hand things over, not to fix them. A crooked gift made by a child is worth more than a straight one made by a grown-up.
Ecuador at a glance
| Capital | Quito |
| Languages | Spanish, Kichwa, Shuar |
| Money | The US dollar — the same as ours |
| Galápagos | 600 miles out in the Pacific |
| The four regions | Costa · Sierra · Amazonía · Galápagos — a beach, a snow-topped volcano, a rainforest and islands of giant tortoises, all inside a country smaller than Nevada. |
| The flag | Yellow, blue and red. The yellow band is as tall as the other two put together — worth checking when they color it. |
How to help at home
- Ask a specific question, not “how was co-op?” Try what did the agouti forget? or who was the last one? Then let them teach you the Spanish word — being the one who knows is what makes it stick.
- Find Ecuador on a map once during each week. The phone counts.
- Do not correct the spelling in the journal. The idea is the assignment, not the handwriting. I will handle the writing.
- At the grocery store, look at the flowers. Four out of ten roses sold in this country grew in Ecuador, and most come through Miami. Check the sleeve for Product of Ecuador — ten seconds, and the country stops being abstract.
Words coming home with them
equator · region · volcano · rainforest · canopy · adaptation · extinct · conservation · abuela · casteñero (brazil nut gatherer) · minga (a community work day) · and in Kichwa, ally punlla — good day.
If they forget everything else, these three stay
- One country, every world inside it. Ecuador stands on the line in the middle of the planet, and holds a beach, a snow-topped volcano, a rainforest and islands of giant tortoises.
- The agouti forgets, and the forest grows. In the rainforest nothing is wasted — not even the empty shell, which a grandmother carves into something worth selling.
- There was a tortoise named George, and he was the last one. What people do about animals matters, and for the rest of them it is not too late.
Questions, or anything you want me to know before we start? Message the WhatsApp group or write to littlelearnclub@gmail.com.
If your child is nervous about the new books, tell me — I will let them look through the pictures before we read it to the group.
See you Wednesday,
Alexa