Highland Games

Over the past two and a half years my oldest has been developing an extraordinary affinity for anything Scottish. She loves the sound of bagpipes, adores plaid, and will often pretend to be a "highland girl" dancing around our kitchen.

You can imagine her delight when we chose to focus our studies on the book "Wee Gillis" this past week. She has been thrilled to learn more about Scotland, make her own bagpipes (from party horns and a ziploc bag - just nip off the corners, poke one "blower side - out" and two "blower side - in" and use packing tape to seal the joints), create Scottish paper dolls, learn how her lungs, voice and ears work, and how sound travels, plus the thrill of listening to drums and bagpipes for a week.

As a bonus, we finished our week with a trip to the NH Highland Games where we were able to see the pipe and drum competitions, caber toss and other strong man competitions (check out the photo - they really do throw sticks as big as telephone poles), sheep herding, and dance finals, and several others.  One of the most interesting was watching a demonstration of the traditional way to tie a kilt - wrapping 9 yards of fabric around your body isn't as easy as you think!  

The kid's program was wonderful, and they were allowed to make shields, sashes, pins (which the kids know the correct name for, but I can't remember right now), and Scottish flags. It was a bit chaotic with all of the children crammed in one tiny craft room, but they enjoyed the change of pace.

Of course, if you ask them, the best part of the day was listening to the bagpipes and rolling down the hill (not an organized sport, but one in which almost every child participated). Once again, the simple pleasures win!