Of all the lessons that have accompanied Travis’s Raddish Kids recipes so far, this one was the least accessible to a preschooler. I did my best to adapt it for Travis and it turned out to be sort of his first social studies project!

First, I set out some of the Thai ingredients we had used in our recipes and grocery store hunt, and invited Travis to test them out with all his senses. He was almost scared by the smell of little bird chiles!

And incidentally loves soy sauce plain. Invite your child to taste, smell, and touch if appropriate, and add items like lemongrass, sugar, lime juice, or ginger.

Big kids can go in depth here into the history of Thai food and learn that being a food historian is a real job; however, the suggested links from Raddish were heavy on text rather than video.

Instead, I showed Travis images of a few other iconic food/country pairs, including:

• Tacos & Mexico
• Baguettes & France
• Sushi & Japan
• Pizza & Italy

I then asked him which he wanted to explore more in-depth. He’s been very into Japan lately (ninjas, in particular), so chose that pairing. Again, there were many suggested links to web resources for big kids, but these were text-heavy and not of interest to my preschooler.
Instead, we located Japan on a world map. We then thought of a few things he knew about the country and printed out pictures of each.

He helped write the word ‘Japan’ across the top, and we glued down the pictures.

Voila! His first social studies project. I was proud he stuck with me for this lesson, which ultimately ended up being quite cute.