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At the Korean picnic that we went to earlier this month, we were given a DVD with a little video about Korea. When we got home, we put it in the DVD player and watched. We didn’t have a clue what was being said because the narration was all in Korean, but we watched.
Prior to putting in the movie, we had prepped my son. We told him we were going to watch a Korean movie. I’m not sure that he had any real concept of what we were watching, but he was excited. He sat down on the couch next to my husband and settled in for the show. As the scenes flashed by, he would say, “We’re watching Korea.”
Though we couldn’t understand what was being said about each location, we could appreciate the beauty that we saw. My husband pointed to pictures of the mountains and said, “Those look like our mountains.” My son laughed and pointed with him. We saw flashes of countryside, peeks at the country’s history and the modern city-life of Seoul.
“I saw that,” my son said when they showed Tae Kwon Do professionals and he moved his arms like the fan dancers when they came on screen. Look at that, I thought, perhaps he is getting something from all of these events that we drag him to. He obviously recognized that these were things that he knew and his three year old brain was making that connection between the events and Korea. Of course, my son still thinks that Korea is close by and that we can drive to it. When he talks about the Korean picnic, he says, “Yesterday, we went to Korean.”
We did learn that you could view the Korean DVD in about twelve different languages if we had just read the menu right. However, we didn’t watch it again in English because it seemed somehow right that we watched it in Korean first.
Great post! I have enjoyed your posts and will miss you! I think it is such a positive gesture to expose your son to your/his Korean roots.