Global Awareness

The activity I selected came from the PBS site. 

The main idea of this unit is to introduce students to the concept of Global Awareness.  Students will learn about children their age in different cultures and will explore the similarities and differences between themselves and the other children.  The Essential Questions for this unit are:

• How can we make connections between our own lives and the lives of children our age in other countries?
• Why is it important to learn about other cultures and how we are the same and different?

Students will be exploring global awareness over the period of a few weeks.  The unit will begin with a K-W-L chart (described above) and books/videos such as:

• Dear Adil  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4dKFU0LPlI )
• Sue Ellen Moves In  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhpizz-eeGU )
• Francine Goes to War (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhkqT3bypo4 )
• Gila Monsters Meet you at the Airport (http://vimeo.com/6238833 )

For this specific lesson (a portion of the unit) students will participate in a “World Wide Web Adventure”.  With only a few computers available, this project will need to be done over a few days to give all of the students the time needed. 

Once all of the students have had the opportunity to complete the adventure, students will share with the class what they have learned about students from different cultures, how they are different, what they have in common and so on.   Finally, the class will complete the last column of the K-W-L chart they began at the beginning of the unit.

My hope is that students will gain an overall understanding of Global Awareness.  I hope that students will learn to be compassionate and understanding of other cultures and thus, more understanding of differences among their own classmates.