Venezuela Unit

Venezuela is a nice little, little being a relative term, country in South America, that I happily got to learn a little more about, but sadly because it is so late in the alphabet, most of our usual sources do not have materials for the unit, so I had to get a little creative about our Venezuela unit for our geography lessons as we head towards finishing up the South America Unit.

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Venezuela Unit resources

When people start to work on big projects, they pick a way to organize what they’re doing, because dates is complicated, how do you pick what date a country was founded when many of the countries have gone through several governments. Invariably that means everyone decides to work on creating materials for countries alphabetically. That’s certainly how we eventually did our continent studies.

Now for writing about them, I’m hopping around, so those poor countries at the end of the alphabet don’t have to wait forever to be written about. So, all of this to say it’s a bit harder to find materials for our Venezuela Unit. I know I’ve said that, but it needs to be repeated.

Also, many of the travel sites that like to write about destinations haven’t written about Venezuela yet, so I don’t have many random 27 facts or anything like that.

• CIA’s Venezuela facts
• Kids’ World Travel for Venezuela
• 7 Venezuela facts– that’s right a whole SEVEN facts, you’re practically drowning in facts
• BBC’s Venezuela facts– so take your pick do you want facts from the CIA or from the BBC?

The Top 10 Archive gave us our video, which my kids did not complain about, so that’s a positive thing.

Oh wait, I just remembered the kids did make fun of the random stuffie on the channel.

Venezuela Unit: Carne Mechada

We started off finding Pabellon Criollo, but we didn’t make the Venezuelan rice and beans dish because I discovered the carne mechada, which looked absolutely delicious and gave me an excuse to make tacos. I am always looking for excuses to make tacos.

Carne Mechada ingredients

• 1 pound beef (skirt or flank steak)
• 2 celery stalks chopped up
• 2 carrots chopped up
• 1 onion diced
• 1 onion finely chopped
• 1 red pepper diced
• 3 cloves of garlic minced
• Worcestershire sauce (what is it about that paper wrapper that makes it seem more fancy?)
• 1 teaspoon cumin (all of our cooking around the world has me totally convince that cumin is amazing!)
• 4 tablespoons tomato sauce

Making the carne mechada

1. Prepare all of the vegetables and place in the bottom of the slow cooker.
2. Put meat on top of the vegetables and cook on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours.
3. Shred the beef.
4. Serve with the minced onions and your favorite taco toppings.

Venezuelan Carne Mechada

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This carne mechada is a great protein base for tacos.

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 8 hours

Total Time 8 hours 15 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 pound beef (skirt or flank steak)
• 2 celery stalks chopped up
• 2 carrots chopped up
• 1 onion diced reserved
• 1 onion finely chopped
• 1 red pepper diced
• 3 cloves of garlic minced
• Worcestershire sauce
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 4 tablespoons tomato sauce

Instructions

1. Prepare all of the vegetables and place in the bottom of the slow cooker.
2. Put meat on top of the vegetables and cook on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours.
3. Shred the beef.
4. Serve with the minced onions, and your favorite taco toppings.

Oh, and I also found this site with about a million more Venezuelan recipes, and by a million, I really mean 20.

Venezuela Unit: notebooking pages

We filled out the South America notebooking pages for our notebooking pages, and at the time Superman and I were listening to the Revolutions podcast covering the Bolivar revolutions in South America, which meant we had lots of asides talking about Simon Bolivar.

Let’s see what fun facts I wrote down.

• They have a pantheon where important people are buried
• During the feast of Corpus Christi, they have Red evils of Yare
• The Wararo tribe still live in traditional style
• They are on their 26th constitution

Okay, that’s our Venezuela Unit. Not as thorough as I’d like, but it’s done.

Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons