Around the World Day 2009
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As I mentioned in my Weekly Wrap-Up, last Friday was our homeschool group’s sixth annual Around the World Day event. It’s a geography fair born of an idea from Hands-On Geography. Each family chooses a country to represent. They spend some learning about their chosen country, then, they put together a display for our event.
Each display contains:
- A presentation board displaying fun facts about the country
- A food and/or drink from the country
- Fact sheets for each family
- Passport stamps for each child
The displays can also contain any of the following or any other ideas a family may have:
- Postcards
- artwork
- crafts
- brochures
- dioramas
- currency
- posters
- music
- reports
- souvenirs
- stamps
- maps
Many of the kids (and adults!) come in costume and all the kids bring a passport book to be stamped at each country they visit. The stamps can be stickers representative of the country (we usually make homemade flag stamps on address labels) or ink stamps.
Our attendance was a bit off this year, but we still had a great time (after the initial stress of the day) and all the kid did a fantastic job on their displays, as you can see:
France (ours)
China
Egypt
Mexico
Russia
Afghanistan and New Guinea
Mexico II
We always really enjoy Around the World Day, though I’d be lying if I said this year wasn’t really stressful for me and I’d have totally bailed if I hadn’t been the event organizer. I’m glad I was forced to follow through, though. I always enjoy looking back on it, even if the actual event and the preparations for it sometimes stress me.
For more ideas like this or tips on planning an Around the World Day, check out my e-book, Hands-On Learning.
Kris Bales is a newly-retired homeschool mom and the quirky, Christ-following, painfully honest founder (and former owner) of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. She has a pretty serious addiction to sweet tea and Words with Friends. Kris and her husband of over 30 years are parents to three amazing homeschool grads. They share their home with three dogs, two cats, a ball python, a bearded dragon, and seven birds.
That is so cool! Thanks for sharing.
This is SO cool!!! I love seeing all the display boards. Reminds me of when I was a little girl scout and my mom (troop leader) helped us organized our own Around the World Day. FUN! I can still remember tasting some of the weirdest foods! lol
…and you just gave me an idea for a spring co-op class!
Our homeschool group is brainstorming classes for the spring. It would be so fun to have a geography fair class to teach about presentation, research, and development. At the end of class, we could have a geography fair and what awesome presentation night displays the kids would have! Thank you!! 🙂
The displays are wonderful! My oldest has been involved twice in history fair projects and I know how much work and research goes into a project like that.
That's very cool! Girl Scouts do something similar for International Fair (also called "Thinking Day") and my daughter looks forward to it every year.
Wow that looks like a lot of work but the finished presentations look fantastic! What was the food from Afghanistan?
This was the first one that we'd been to. Maybe next year we'll be able to take time from our regularly scheduled curriculum to actually do a display.
Glad that it went well! It looks fabulous!!!!
We do something similar in Brownies.