Froebel Home Education, Etymology | Word Study Créole

Blog post will be edited & updated momentarily. Thank you for your patience.

Yesterday, Janvier (January) 22, was Créole Heritage day and also the birthday of the Créole, Saint Augustine. Créole Heritage day is a national recognized holiday recognized by our government, the United States of America. Créole Heritage day was established on Saint Augustine birthday to commemorate Augustine Meteyor, the first Créole born in oldest Créole city Natchitoches*.

With any new topic, we began, I start the lesson off with etymology/word study of a particular word that is associated with the topic at hand. Since, it is the day after Créole Heritage day, our word of study will be Créole, one of our namesakes. To present the word Créole, which is one of the few words that described my children, I drew a circle in the middle of our chalkboard. Next, I drew a triangle in the middle of the circle. By drawing a triangle inside of the circle, I have created four sections from inside of the circle. In each section I wrote four different language words for the English word Creole. These languages are from the three Countries that have a hand in the Creation of the Créole Nation. Portugal, the country who began slavery of a New Breed of people and named them Crioulo. France, who were inspired by the Portuguese and traded slaves with the Portuguese and began selecting different Africans of different countries with different physical features to create more of what they called, Créole. And finally, Spain, who was also inspired by the Portuguese and like the French began creating the same New Race of people, they called Criollo. It is the Spanish word Criollo that historians credit as the origins of were Our name Créole originated from. But it was in fact, the Portuguese not the Spaniards. In the triangle drawn in the center of the circle, I wrote the word Créole, the Louisiana and West Floridan French word. From our French word, Créole, the British, Canadian, American and Australian English word Creole is derived.

After the completion of the word introduction in each language and their respect pronunciations, I spelled each word with German environmental friendly planks/bricks, which fat brain toys and _ from (at blog) has wrote about the similarity between modern day planks and Froebel gift 4. Fat Brain toys express that planks/bricks are modern alternatives to Froebel gift 4, Spibegaben gift 4. I also spelled in front of my children the German word Kreol with French Montessori movable alphabets. Louisiana Créole also known as Kourivini and Mississippi Gulf Coast French also share the same word, Kreol with the German language, as the word to addressing us by. My children were asked to follow my example and using the planks and Froebel gift 4 spell each word as the pronounced each word.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.