Our Geography Project

Alexis's I Am A Citizen of the World Banner

Alexis's study area we created today.

It is very important to me and my family that Alexis learn about cultural diversity. In rural Indiana we don't get many opportunities to experience different cultures so we have to be creative. We are going to travel the globe without actually leaving Indiana.

How do you experience culture without traveling? That is the tricky part...one thing we have done is join Postcrossing, a postcard exchange. I wrote a blog post about this a few days ago. The idea is that we will receive postcards from all around the world as well as send postcards all around the world.

This week we started a unit study on the continents. We bought a world map and created a comfortable study area. We talked about which continent we live on and which continent is the largest. 

Alexis is sending her first postcard to Lithuania, so we looked at Lithuania on the world map. We also looked at photographs on the internet of Lithuania and the people.

Monthly we will be doing more in depth studies of specific countries and cultures. In September we will be studying, in depth, about Native Americans. This will tie in with our current history lessons and we have two Native American events happening within an hour from us. 

For each culture we study we will also make recipes that are popular for that culture. There is a Native American Powwow in September and we will have the opportunity to eat fry bread and Native American Tacos. 

This project is going to demand a lot of organization. But we are determined to experience cultures outside of our rural area. We want Alexis to learn that no matter where you live or what color your skin is, we are all citizens of this world. We all deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and it is ok to be different.