Queen of Savings was provided with a sample product at no cost to me for review purposes only. This review is based solely on my personal opinion and experience and results may vary from person to person.
Jamboo The Travelling Monk travels all of the world and collects different items along his trips for you to read and look at, in essence experiencing the trip with him. It is like having a friend or family member go on vacation and send you back pictures, post cards and a journal of the trip. For the item I received for review, Jamboo took a trip to India. Included is the book Ramayana – Divine Loophole by Sanjay Patel. I had never heard of Ramayana before I received this book, but from what I understand it is one of the great Hindu epics. It depicts the duties of relationships, portraying ideal characters like the ideal father, ideal servant, the ideal brother, the ideal wife and the ideal king.
I have used this “packet” for lack of a better words, in our homeschooling classes for our three children. My children did not find reading the book as interesting as much as they liked looking at the pictures. The Author and Illustrator, Sanjay Patel is an animator and storyboard artist for Pixar and has worked on features such as Monsters Inc., A Bug’s Life, Cars and Toy Story so as you can imagine his artistic skills are top notch. All of the images in the book are vector images which are very time consuming to create, and as a result this book took over 4 years to complete.
The little pamphlet we received, A Guide to India was very helpful in learning about India. It is like a quick reference tour guide of all of the sites and sounds of India. The first page is a letter to parents telling about the purpose of the guide and what you can expect to find inside. For our India guide, Jamboo says we can expect stories, postcards, recipes and a Rangoli activity. The guide continues with telling us about the top ten Indian experiences and includes the neighborhood markets, street festivals. the Himalayas and more. A very interesting section of the guide tells us about celebrating Diwali which is described as Christmas, New years, Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl all at the same time. We are told about how the locals dress for the occasion and the foods they eat. Included is a recipe for Ladoos which is one of India’s most popular sweets, especially during Diwali, we have not made the recipe yet, but certainly intend to. Rangoli means the coming together of colors and in India they use different colored powders to make various designs, we were sent three colored powders to try Rangoli out for ourselves.
If you are looking to explore different cultures with your children or homeschool them like I do, the adventures of Jamboo the Travelling Monk can be a very easy way to do this. It is nice that it comes with a little bit of everything to give you a true sense of the culture.
James L. says
Looks pretty neat! How can we order one? Most of the things that I’ve seen like this are usually pretty superficial and don’t seem authentic. I think i’ll try this!
Justine says
It looks like it is currently sold out, but if you go to the link in the post above you can be put on a waiting list for it.