Where’s Canada?
I know it sounds like a South Park joke but “Where’s Canada?” was really a question Principal Yang of Guan Ai School posed to a vanful of primary school kids as he drove them back to their villages when school got out last
weekend. I was sitting in the front seat and since I studied in Canada, I guess I inspired the sudden geography quiz. Actually, the entire question was, “加拿大在哪里？在宇宙或者地球 ?” which means, “Where’s Canada? In outer space or on the planet?” The kids thought a bit and then one yelled back, “宇宙! Outer space!” Of course, some got the question right, too. But I’m thinking maps would be a nice classroom addition here. The 好好学习天天向上 concept has too much of a monopoly of the bare white walls. We need to get some geography learning going on too. Maybe we can put little stars in the cities where RCEF volunteers live and you can all send messages to Guan Ai from your respective parts of the world. I think that’d make your countries at least seem more interesting and friendly to the kids. What do you think?
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Wei Ji Ma (blog author) says:
Added on December 31st, 2007 at %0:%Dec %pI really like this post - it is grippingly written - and the idea - i loved geography as a child and i asked for a globe for my birthday (i still like it). Yes, it would be a wonderful idea to have a world map and try to relate to other countries through messages from other RCEF people. This can easily be made into a geography / culture lesson. (Make sure to also ask the volunteers what is their typical local food!)
As another idea, maybe you can have next to the world map a self-drawn village map (a collective version of what we did in Art class in VP06) and then have children mark where they live. The same concept, a different scale… and it may make the kinds think about the nested environments that they are part of.