Los Animales del Caribe

¡Hola, mis amigos!

I am now back in Massachusetts, but I wanted to share one last set of pictures from my trip to Costa Rica. During the final weekend of my trip, I went to the beach on the Caribbean coast. The red dot shows the town of Cahuita, where I stayed:

In this area I got to see some more animals. Some are common in the United States, but most are not. 

el caballo

el cangrejo

el mono

el cocodrilo

el loro

All of these animals were just outside of my hotel room at the beach — even the crocodiles! The crocodiles only came out of the creek when the cook at the hotel fed them chicken wings and feet leftover from the kitchen. 

Sometimes the parrot was allowed to walk around the hotel, but other times he was kept in his cage. Make sure to press play so you can hear him talk — he speaks Spanish!

I had a wonderful summer in Costa Rica, but now I am excited to start school. I can't wait to see you and hear all about your summer too!

¡Me gusta el rafting!

¡Hola amigos!

Going to Costa Rica has given me the chance to try some things I've never done before. My favorite new activity this summer is whitewater rafting.

Many sports in Central America come from the United States, so they don't have a special Spanish word. In Spanish, whitewater rafting is just known as el rafting. 

To start our trip, our guides picked us up at our house in Turrialba. They drove a van that carried our big raft on top:

It was raining really hard in town, but our guides said it hardly ever rains in the morning at the river. Luckily, they were right! By the time we got to the river, the rain had stopped.

Our drive to the Río Pejibaye took about 45 minutes. On the way we passed a large lake formed by a dam. We drove around many twisty, windy roads high up into the hills outside of Turrialba.

The first thing we did when we got there was put on our life vests and helmets:

Here is a picture of my husband, son, and daughter in their safety gear. It is important to wear the vests and helmets because sometimes the river is very fast, which the makes the raft ride fast and fun, but also very bumpy. You can see a little bit of the white water behind my family — the whiter it is, the faster it's going. You can also see that there are many rocks in the river, and the helmets will protect you from a bad bump on the head.

Before we left the shore, our guide taught us how to paddle and how to follow his directions for keeping the raft going straight. Paddling is hard work, and we all had to work as a team to steer the raft down the river:

Rafting is also very wet, so I couldn't take my camera out while we were paddling. The picture above is of another family that was behind us on the river. The adults usually sit in the front to steer, and the kids sit in the middle to paddle hard. The guide sits in the back so he can see the river and everyone else in the boat at the same time. The second guide rides ahead in the kayak to find the best route through the rapids and to rescue anyone who falls out of the raft.

And guess what? One of us DID fall out of the raft! We went over a big bump, and it bounced one of us out into the water. Luckily our guide was very fast, and pulled that person right back into the boat before the kayaker even noticed he had fallen. 

Can you guess who it was?

(Luckily, it wasn't me!)

It was... 

My son, Jonas. He just turned 10 and is a good swimmer, but he was scared when it happened. After the guide got Jonas back into the boat, he pulled off to the shore to let him catch his breath and calm down before we kept going. He also let us climb some big rocks and dive into the river for a swim, which was fun for everyone! The water was clean and refreshing.

Not all of the trip was fast and exciting. Some times the river was calm and slow, and we could look around to see all of the jungle scenery around us:

We saw many birds, another blue morpho butterfly, and some horses on our way.

At the end of our rafting trip, our guides flipped over the raft to turn it into a table:

They put aprons on because they set up a surprise picnic for us to enjoy at the end of our trip. We had watermelon, pineapple, guacamole, and could make our own burritos with lots of delicious toppings. After all that paddling, we were hungry!

We had a really fun time rafting, and hope to do it again someday!

What was your favorite outdoor activity this summer?

Las Frutas de Costa Rica

¡Hola amigos!

One really great thing about Costa Rica is the fruit. Because it never gets cold enough to snow in Costa Rica, farmers there can grow delicious fruit all year long. That means that we could easily find fresh tropical fruit from local fruit stands whenever we were hungry for something sweet. What fruits do you recognize on my breakfast plate below?

Hay sandía, piña, fresa, papaya, y mango.

(There are watermelon, pineapple, strawberry, papaya, and mango.) 

¿Qué es tu fruta favorita?

Mi fruta favorita es piña.

I also got to taste some fruits I have never seen before! Our favorite is this strange-looking fruit:

Hay un mamón chino.

This fruit doesn't really have an English name, though a friend from China told me that in Asia it is called a rambutan. The red, spiny skin is peeled off, and inside is the delicious white fruit:

Once you peel the skin off, you can eat the fruit and spit out the pit, which is about the size and shape of an almond. The fruit is very sweet and delicious. It tastes sort of like a big grape, but not at all sour.

We also tried this fruit at a chocolate farm near the Caribbean Sea:

I wish I could tell you what this fruit is called, but the person who gave it to me is a member of the Bribrí tribe of Native Americans who live in Costa Rica. She spoke English, Spanish, and Bribrí, but only knew the Bribrí word for this fruit. She climbed up a ladder and used a special stick to pull it down from a high branch for us:

Then she used a machete (a very large, sharp knife) to cut it into pieces for us to try:

This fruit is very soft and sweet. When you eat it, you only eat the white part, not the yellow rind. You also spit out the large, black seeds like you would with watermelon seeds. 

We also got to try chocolate fruit:

This fruit does not taste like chocolate at all. Once you cut open the shell, it comes in white sections, sort of the way an orange can be pulled apart into wedges. The white fruit is tangy and juicy. 

The reason this is called chocolate fruit is because it is the fruit of the cacao plant. Inside each section of fruit is a large seed. You could eat this seed, but it is very bitter. Instead of eating them, they are saved to make chocolate. This seed is a cocoa bean, and they are roasted and ground into the cocoa powder that we use to make brownies, cakes, and cookies. 

When we weren't eating fruit, we were drinking it! In Costa Rica we enjoyed many types of fruit juice. Our favorite was this one:

Can you tell what the ingredients are? Do you remember how to say them in Spanish?

We also drank a lot of delicious aguas naturales:

These wonderful drinks are like smoothies made of fruit, milk, and ice. The one I am drinking here is made of pineapple and starfruit, but they can be made with all types of tropical fruits (or combinations of fruits). These drinks are healthy and refreshing on a hot day!

What kind of fruit would you like to try in a tropical smoothie? You can tell me in the comments if you like.

¡Adiós!

Remember to press the blue "play" button a few times so you can practice pronouncing the Spanish words. Also, if you would like to learn more about how the cacao plant is used to make chocolate, you can ask your parents to help you read the story I wrote about it for grownups on a different blog. Part one is HERE and part two is HERE. In it you will also learn more about what life is like in the Bribrí tribe in Costa Rica.

Rainforest Animals

¡Hola amigos!

One of the best parts about my trip to Costa Rica has been getting to see all the animals of the rainforest in their natural habitat. In the United States, many of these animals only live in zoos. Here in Costa Rica, you can travel to the rainforest and see how the animals live.

We traveled to the rainforest near the Pacific Ocean and stayed in a very small town called Uvita. It is marked with a red star:

The weather in the rainforest is usually hot and humid. It might be sunny for a little bit in the morning, but it rains almost every afternoon. 

We had a guide through the rainforest who helped us see many animals. They aren't easy to spot because they are often hiding from people, but with the help of our guide, we saw a lot! Here are all the animals we saw:

These are capuchin monkeys. They are small but very, very smart. Our guide said that they have learned how to use basic tools to eat fruits without wasting any of it, and they have also learned how to steal snacks out of travelers' backpacks. 

This is a mother and baby sloth. Sloths are animals that live in trees and move very, very slowly. Most of the time they are curled up in a ball asleep, but our guide was able to get them to look at us by whistling loudly at them.

This is a family of fruit bats. A fruit bat is about as big as a chipmunk, but they also have wings. They make tents out of large banana leaves to keep their babies safe. 

This is a land crab. It's about as big as my fist, and can only walk sideways. It clicks its claws in the air to scare away other animals that might try to eat it.

This is a tercipelo snake. It is the most common poisonous snake in Costa Rica, and many people who work out in the fields are bitten by one each year. Most people are able to survive by getting to a local doctor for medicine to stop the poison from spreading through their bodies. It is very hard to see this snake because its brown skin blends in well with the ground, and it stays very, very still. Or guides put a large rock near it to warn others about it.

This is a blue morpho butterfly. This rare butterfly is only ever seen alone. One side of its wings are a beautiful, bright blue, but the other side is plain brown, which helps camouflage it to keep it safe. Our guide told us that the native tribes of Costa Rica tell a story about a young girl who fell in love with a boy who didn't love her back. When he grew up and married someone else, she went to the river near her village, took off her brown clothes and left them by the river bank, and was never seen again. The villagers at first thought that she drowned in the river, but when they went to gather her clothing, this butterfly flew up and away, fluttering brown and blue. This story explains why this type of butterfly is only ever seen alone, never with a partner.

This is a poison dart frog. It is very small — not much bigger than my thumb. Even though it is tiny, it is very dangerous because it sweats out a poison strong enough to kill four adults if they touch it. Native people used to catch them in a large leaf, then wipe the poison sweat left behind on the leaf onto their darts, which they would then use to hunt wild pigs. The poison would paralyze the pig so the hunters could catch it and eat it later. To eat the pig, the hunters had to wait until the poison wore off of the pig so that the meat was safe to eat.

These are toucans. They are large, loud birds with very colorful faces. They fly high above the rest of the rainforest, but they never fly in a straight line. Instead, they make large, swooping U-shapes when they fly from tree to tree.

These are leaf cutter ants. They travel together in long lines to bring back pieces of leaves to eat. We saw a long highway of ants bringing pieces of green leaves and tiny white flowers from the top of a tree, across a road, and into their hole. 

These are not pictures that I took in the rainforest. It was raining pretty hard during our tour and I didn't want to get my camera wet, so I found pictures on the Internet to show you. I did manage to take a video of the leaf cutter ants, though. If you want to see that, click HERE to go the grade 3 and 4 website. The video is all in Spanish, so if you want to challenge yourself to learn more about these animals, give it a try!

What is your favorite rainforest animal? You can write a comment to let me know at the bottom of this page.

El Dinero de Costa Rica

¡Hola amigos!

One of the fun things about going to another country is getting to use a different kind of money to buy things. Costa Rica has some really beautiful paper money. We'll take a look at it below while we practice some Spanish together. Press the blue "play" button to hear me say the Spanish words, then press it again to practice saying it out loud.

¿De qué color es el dinero?

El dinero es anaranjado, verde, amarillo, y rojo.

And one more colorful bill that I almost forgot!

¿De qué color es el dinero?

El dinero es azul.

As you can see, the money in Costa Rica is very colorful. To me, the best part is that is has a different animal on each bill. Each animal shown on the money lives in Costa Rica — in the wild, not just in zoos! 

The animal on the money that is anaranjado is a colibrí. 

(In English this is called a hummingbird.)  

The animal on the money that is verde is a perezoso. 

(In English this is called a sloth.)

The animal on the money that is amarillo is a mono.

(In English this is called a monkey.)

The animal on the money that is rojo is a venado. 

(In English this is called a deer.)

The animal on the money that is azul is a tiburón. 

(In English this is called a shark.)

So far I have seen three of these animals here in Costa Rica. Next time I'll tell you which ones, and I will tell you all about the other interesting animals I saw on a tour of the rainforest.

¡Adiós!

Mi Casa

¡Hola amigos!

After our weekend hiking the volcano named Volcán Poás, we went to the town of Turrialba to move into the house where we will be living while we are in Costa Rica. Here's a map of Costa Rica that shows our route from the volcano to our town:

That was a long drive through more mountains, but now we are here and enjoying our house. Here's what it looks like from the outside:

Mi casa es morada.

(Hint: Click on the blue "play" button above to hear me say the Spanish sentence. Then click on it again to say it with me! There will be more of these as you keep reading.)

Most houses in Costa Rica are smaller than they are in the United States. Most of the houses in small towns are only one story, which means they don't have an upstairs or a basement. 

Also, houses here have a strong front gate and bars on the windows. Costa Rican people keep their gates locked but their doors and windows open, which lets them call out a nice, loud ¡hola! to say hello to friends as they walk by.

When you walk through the front door, you can see that most of our house is an open space. In the living room there is a stone wall that holds many beautiful plants beneath a skylight. In our house the living room and dining room are the same:

Mi sala es azul.

Behind the stone wall is the kitchen. You can see that the plants grow over both sides of the wall. The vines are so big that they touch the top of the refrigerator!

Mi cocina es azul.

The back door of the house is in the kitchen. Instead of a back yard with grass, we have a patio with white tiles. The patio is surrounded by a wall and many garden plants. Part of the patio is under a wooden roof, so we can still sit outside when it rains:

Mi patio es verde.

My bedroom is near the back of the house and has a nice window to the patio. Sometimes small geckos climb onto my windowsill and make a chirping sound. They are very fast and don't like their picture taken, but I will keep trying.

Mi cuarto es rosado.

The small door in my bedroom leads to the bathroom. It is small, and has a shelf instead of cabinets. There is also a shower with hot water, but it's not in the picture:  

Mi baño es verde.

My son and daughter are sharing a room together. They each have their own bed, but take turns sitting at the desk to their homework:

El cuarto pequeño es amarillo.

There are no carpets in our house. We have tile floors instead. In the summer, it rains here at least a little almost every day, and it's much easier to keep a tile floor clean from mud. We also have a television in the living room, and there are lots of shows in English and in Spanish. My kids like the Disney channel the best, because they can learn the Spanish words to the movies they already know by heart.

If you are interested in watching a short video about my house here in Costa Rica, you can click HERE to go to my website for grades 3 and 4. In that video I use many Spanish words that you haven't learned yet, but feel free to give it a try! There's also a coloring page at that link that you might like.

¿Qué tiempo hace en Costa Rica?

¡Hola amigos!

I have been in Costa Rica for five days now, and I really like it. ¡Me encanta! 

Last Friday our airplane landed in San José, the capital city of Costa Rica. After that, I rented a car to drive out into the country to see a real, active volcano: Volcán Poás.

This volcano has a large, steamy crater that you can look into when you get to the top. The day we were there, though, this is all we could see:

Most of the time, it is very foggy and cloudy at the top of the volcano, and we couldn't see very far into the crater. This climate is known as a cloud forest because it is almost always cloudy and drizzly. It is different from a rain forest, though, because the temperature is always cool instead of hot. This is what the plants of a cloud forest look like: 

One plant is especially useful in the cloud forest. It is called a sombrilla de pobres, or the Poor Man's Umbrella. Can you guess why?

My daughter Tiegan and my son Jonas are showing you how people use this plant to stay dry when it rains in the cloud forest.

It wasn't always rainy while we were at the volcano, though. Here is a video I made for you of the weather at the lodge where we stayed while visiting the volcano: 

Did you sing along? 

Finally, many of the words I used in the video are in the coloring page below. After you print it out and color it in, see how many things you can point to and name on your own.

¡Hasta luego!

Some Facts About Costa Rica

¡Hola amigos!

I hope you are having a wonderful summer. I know I am!   I am still here at home in Massachusetts, but in just three days I will be in Costa Rica! 

Before we go, I made you a video to teach you some things about the country of Costa Rica. The video below will show you some maps of Costa Rica and its flag.

Watch closely and see if you can answer the questions at the end! 

I hope you liked the video. Now I have an art project for you:

To color in the flag of Costa Rica, click on the picture of it and print it out. You can check your work with the picture below:

¡Adiós, amigos!

¡Bienvenidos! Welcome!

I'm so excited to be traveling to Costa Rica this summer!

For four weeks in July and August, I will be living in an apartment in a small city called Turrialba and practicing my Spanish at a Spanish language school. My children will be traveling with me and going to an elementary school in town to learn Spanish (just like you!). We'll have our classes in the morning, and during the afternoons and weekends we will explore as many different parts of Costa Rica as we can get to. We'll also be doing plenty of things that regular families in Costa Rica do, like shopping and cooking dinner (and doing homework).

I plan to share lots of pictures and videos of my trip, and I will also add some activities that you can do to learn new Spanish words right along with us. You should be able to click on all the blue links to find fun activities online, and you can also print out worksheets to do on your own.

Also, I would love it if you say hello by writing comments to me at the bottom of the posts — just check with your parents first to make sure that's ok. A good idea might be just to use your only your first name (or even just your initials) and last year's classroom. For example, John Smith in 2K would be John 2K (or JS 2K). That way I will know who you are, but strangers won't.

The best way to follow along is to sign up in the email box at the top of the page, so you get an alert whenever I post something new. Again, ask your parents to help you with this (especially if you don't have your own email yet!).

Finally, this trip wouldn't be possible without the generosity of the Brookline Education Foundation. They awarded me a grant to help pay for this trip, and for that I deeply grateful. Their work makes it possible for me to share this wonderful adventure with you!

I really hope you keep coming to this website to come along on my adventure to Costa Rica. It will be so much fun!

¡Vámonos!