S/O living internationally-how can one make their dc more globally aware?

[HappyGrace]

Right from home, that is? I don't think we in the US generally realize how America-centric we are. I'm just realizing it myself! I'd love to have my children be international students of the world through travel, but that will never happen. ;)

 

We do study other cultures historically via SOTW, and missionary stories. We read letters from our church missionaries. I did my own made-up countries and cultures study (loosely based on WP CAW And MFW ECC) with dd in 2nd grade, and am doing the same with ds now in 1st grade. But it's not the same as being there-lol! And it somehow doesn't feel like *enough*. I don't know if this is on my heart because someday they will travel, or what!? Maybe they will carry out the Great Commission to farther places than I ever will? I wonder if there are ways to help children be more savvy about life in other countries and cultures, and loving their own country, but not completely centered on it.

[Alphabetika]

Get the books Material World and Hungry Planet. These are a great way to make your kids (and yourself!) aware of the great discrepancies between the way Americans live comapred to the rest of the world.

 

I share your dilemma and look forward to reading others' ideas. Thanks for starting this thread!

[HappyGrace]

LOVED Material World! I think it was one of the resources for WP CAW and we used it in our countries/cultures study.

 

Other good books were Celebrations and Children Around the World (I think is the name), both by DK. Both my dc LOVE to look at those books still! For a Christian pov, we love Window on the World. We have tons of books; just not sure how to get the dc to have that *perspective* of thinking globally, kwim?

[KJB]

What is the limiting factor for you with regard to international travel? (A rhetorical question....)

 

Depending upon your occupation(s) and your interests, travel may be well within the reach of your family. So, off the bat, I wouldn't have the attitude that actual international experience is impossible.

 

For example, if you/dh are certified to teach, there are many opportunities to live abroad. If you're in health care, there are lots of places that want you. If you can build, farm, or work in finance, there are opportunities.

 

For your children, there are also many possibilities beginning with being a foreign exchange student. There are also mission trips, camps, and volunteer opportunities. And of course, there are many career paths that can lead to a life of cultural nomad.

 

Now, if you have littler children and/or just don't feel up to the major life upheaval, you can learn a lot just by traveling to many larger US cities. NYC, San Fran, Dallas, Chicago, etc., are very multicultural. In any one of those cities you can eat at authentic restaurants from all around the world and meet people who speak their native tongue often in addition to english.

 

If travel is out of the question, then starting a multicultural event/club asking people of different cultures to come together is a great way to sample the international flavors of people, music, and food. You could ask the library to hold such an event or to offer a meeting place for a club.

 

Don't discount a fun afternoon at places like Epcot either. The resort itself is a taste of the world of course, but the international tourists will really drive it home that you are in a world bigger than you.

 

Americans have tremendous multicultural opportunity because of all of the immigrants that make up our country. Diversity is truly at your doorstep.

[HollyDay]

We watch BBC news via the internet. I also on occasion read the Jerusalem Post via the net. Our PBS has Irish News on over the weekend. It helps to see the news from the POV of other places.

 

Material World is excellent. We also have Children Just Like Me from DK.

 

If you live in an area with mulit cultural access, use that to your advantage. We do not at the present. But, before we moved here we were blessed with Cuban, Brazilian, and Jamaican neighbors. They were an awesome resource!

[EmilyK]

I was going to suggest BBC World News too. We get it on our cable and also on our local PBS station. They also have a podcast of news for kids.

[HappyGrace]

Unfortunately, finances don't allow for travel of any kind :(, and dh likes to be very settled-he is NOT good with change of any kind. I am fine with that and totally understand.

 

We live in a white-bread suburb with NO diversity at all. I LOVE your idea of a multicultural club, or even just intentionally getting to know people of other cultures. We do have a very close friend that is Korean who LOVES to cook-I will talk to her about learning more about her culture. There is an older Indian woman at church-I can talk to her and get to know her better too, and hopefully bring the dc in on it. I am inspired to keep my eyes open for more opportunities to get to know people better who are from different backgrounds!

 

I will look for the BBC stuff too, thanks!

[Guest]

Material World and Hungry World are both excellent.

 

Also: If the World Were a Village. We laid out many of the statistics in this book using Barbies or action figures so the effect was more powerful and immediate.

 

Klutz used to publish a book called Earthsearch. It's now out of print but still available used at amazon and a number of other used book sites. This is a great activity book that focuses on understanding how unusual it is, relatively speaking, to come from a first-world nation. There are spinner games that show you what the chances would be, if you were born today, of being born in an underdeveloped nation; there's a tiny packet of rice bound into the book that represents a day's food rations for a person from an impoverished third-world nation; there are coins from various countries in the back with a map; etc.

 

The magazine Faces is another possible resource that shows what it's like to live in various countries around the world.

 

And don't think that your kids are missing out so much by not having foreign travel experience at this age. I read a great article about wealthy kids who habitually travel for vacation to other countries and their main take-away was whether or not American-style fast food was available. It's not the travel in and of itself that makes a person a global citizen; it's the attitude you take along with you.

 

And you can establish that through open exploration of the world right at home. That's how people have done it for most of history, when travel was the exception rather than the rule. Even wealthy people in Britain, for instance, generally traveled only after university, when they went on the European "Grand Tour," or were in the Navy or Army.

 

I'd also like to note that an underused option is exploring the neighborhoods of a major city. You don't have to go into dangerous places to see highs and lows economically, or to see patterns of who works in what jobs and where, to be exposed to different languages, to explore ethnic restaurants and shops and art, to note that people of different cultural backgrounds worship differently or build differently architecturally, and on and on.

[laughing lioness]

We have traveled as much as we've been able and have allowed/encouraged our kids to do so with or without us. Who says they can't? There are GREAT missions programs for kids, along with Rotary International and other exchange programs.- our oldest has been to England, Romania, Hungary, Amsterdam, Ecuador - all with out us, beginning when she was 14. (no, we are not rolling in dough!). We also lived in seminary housing in So. California for 6 years and had TONS of international neighbors, some of whom we still support. We've had missionaries in our home who would share GREAT and CRAZy stories. Our dd has many international friends from her travels who have become our friends and we keep in touch.

Find a missionary through your church or the local seminary and get to know them. Send them cheerios, or curriculum (many homeschool) or whatever they need and/ or are missing and correspond and pray for them. When they are in the states, have them come and eat with you.

Read about families that have done it; I have a review on my blog right now about a family that has created "Global Kids."

[Photo Ninja]

We checked out ethnic areas in cities we were near - Koreatown, Chinatown, etc. We explored ethnic grocery stores and often ate at ethnic restaurants. It was fun, and our dc were able to see, smell and taste differences.

 

One thing my kids liked were the Michael Palin series of tv shows. You can get them from the library. He has one on Pole to Pole, where he traveled from the North Pole to the South Pole, one on the Pacific Rim, Around the World in 80 days, etc. He didn't travel first class and eat at expensive restaurants, and always spoke with people on the streets. It introduced my kids to how life is very different in various countries, and we would follow along with a map or globe. He travels to many countries, and uses various forms of transportation, including riding on the top of a train (the cheap seats). It was eye opening, and my kids loved the series, always wanting to watch just one more episode to see more interesting places.

 

Inviting missionaries or people you meet from other cultures to your home for dinner is also interesting because you dc get to hear stories about life in other countries.

 

Use a calendar that has holidays from other nations on it, or find dates of holidays and put them onto your calendar and incorporate that into your lessons or daily life. Sometimes I added a lesson that went along with that holiday. Boys' and Girls' Day in Japan, etc. are easy to mention and look up on the internet to see pictures, etc. It doesn't have to be time consuming, and you can introduce these various celebrations in a few minutes. At one time I used a world map and printed up a title and photo or something to go along with the holiday, and we placed them around the map with string leading to the country. It was easy to do for a one year study, but was not time consuming at all.

 

Read books set in other countries. Read folk tales from other countries. I once got a book from the library that was all Cinderella type stories from many different countries. We were able to discuss why there were differences in the story that varied by culture. It was easy, but introduced my kids to different lifestyles in various countries.

[OrganicAnn]

There are websites where you can get newpapers or newpaper articles from almost every country in the world translated into English. If you are doing current affairs, you could try to find articles from other countries to see how differently they view a topic. I think that is more important than when you study a country dressing up in their native costume or cooking a recipe native to a country. The older the children the better this would work.

[elfgivas]

our dc love the videos "children of.... (india, mexico, egypt)" etc. there are free country study guides available on line. there is something about seeing the daily life of another child, narrated by the child, that opens them up to all sorts of new learnings.

our children's library used to have them... it closed : (. they are available for purchase on line.

 

have fun,

ann

 

ps. if you crunch numbers, international travel is actually affodable. use a credit card that accrues air miles. take a tent. you have to pay for food any way.... from the usa, a trip to quebec is to a very different culture, and not that far from here....

[Peela]

Your kids are little- anything like a WTM education will help. Over years...wow, its a lot of exposure to different cultures, past and present. We have various maps on the world and I am forever asking them to find places so that they have a familiarity with different countries and where they are. That alone has helped ME become more conscious of the world scene.

I think little kids naturally feel they are the centre of the world, and it changes as they get older. I would be concerned if my teens werent fairly aware of the big wide world...but not young kids. Slowly slowly, if its your intention, it will happen.

One thing I do is make sure we watch a wide range of movies- historical, geographical etc. But, again, my kids are old enough to watch adult movies. For example, Monsoon Wedding- India- Blood Diamond- Africa- zillions of U.S. ones obviously- Rabbit Proof Fence- Aboriginal Australia...there are so many. Also, my kids are not allowed to watch soapies or sitcoms (what I call "junk TV" ) during the day..but if they want to sit and watch TV before their friends get home from school, they can watch documentaries.

[Carol in Cal.]

It happens that we live in a pretty diverse area as well, but the reading and map study that we do is the most helpful factor here. Also, I look for cultural and living history events to take DD to, and we purchase most of the readers for Sonlight 5, used, from on this board, and have read them together.

[Rosie_0801]

Working with refugees can be interesting, if you have refugees in your part of the world. We attended an ethnic playgroup last year, and for the most part our town looks almost as Anglo as can be. I gave reading lessons to some of the Karen mums from the Burmese/Thai border for a while too. If you know an Indian lady and a Korean lady, there will be more people out there. I met an Indonesian lady through playgroup and she was getting together with a bunch of other local Indonesian ladies for a cooking club. If there is an ethnic/ multicultural services council in your area, go and have a chat. Ours is involved with Karen New Year dinners each year and all sorts of other things that don't get advertised where one would usually see.

 

Rosie

[Sebastian (a lady)]

You have no diversity at all, BUT you have a Korean friend and an Indian woman at church? That's not no diversity. That just means that you might have to be outgoing and questing to find what you're looking for. I would definitely be asking the Indian lady to teach me to cook. I love Indian food.

 

And keep an ear out. Maybe you'll find one of your friends has traveled or does travel and would send your kids postcards.

 

You might check out some of the youth resources at Wycliff or The Seed Company.

 

Or you could pick one country a quarter and read about it over a period of time. That's four a year times several years. A good basis for thinking of more than your own country.

[TravelingChris]

At a minimum, I would travel to different cultures in the US. THere are both areas of this country that have a different pace and a different culture and there are areas that are very multicultural. FOr the former, I included places like New Mexico, coastal non touristy New England, beach town Florida and particulalry the Keys in Florida, rural South (including rural Florida), delta land Sacremento delta, etc, etc. Now for great multicultural cities places like New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and LA are great among others.

 

Another suggestion is if you get cable or satellite tv, is the French news program on a high channel in our line-up. It gives world news in English but from a French perspective. They always showcase stories that our news misses. Another channel that we had in another area but not here is the World Music channel. The kids really liked that. So much that they have taken to listening to radio stations on the internet from other countries to hear a wider variety of music.