Here in Australia, we have people from all over the
world and we have this incredible opportunity to
connect with them, to learn from them and to bring their
natural resources into our classrooms. Welcome to
neuroeducation. where we're exploring the neuroscience of
how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning. I'll be sharing
with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies,
and educational advocacy. I'm your host, Angie Dee.
Together, let's revolutionize children's learning. Hello,
everybody. Thank you so much for joining us again on
Neuroeducation Podcast with Angie Dee. Today,
we're going to be talking about what are some great resources
that are easy to source and cheap, if
not free, that you can do at
home with your children or at your family
daycare, childcare center, school, wherever it may be. to
explore the world and even our letters and
our numbers. So I wanted to start
by a absolutely fantastic method
of exploring the world from
our own little backyard. There's a beautiful song
by Ella Jenkins. And in the song, she says, we
can travel on a boat. We can travel on a plane. We
can travel in a song and we can travel in a game. And
she goes on to say all the different ways that we can travel, but really we can
travel. through music, through dance, there's
so many things that we can do to explore the world right
from our backyard. When I was doing some volunteering
to teach English to refugees at a fantastic school
here in Brisbane, Australia called Milpera High, I
learned so much about the world, so much about languages,
cultures, dance, food, from all the amazing cultural
experiences I had right there at that school. And
how do we do this? Because the students were
sharing, parents were sharing. And I
felt even after I went to another country, which
I went to Tahiti in 2004, I
loved Tahiti, loved the people, loved the food, loved
the dance, but I didn't feel like I had a huge, let's
say cultural, culturally personal experience because
while I went to a cultural show and I watched the dance, uh,
I ate the food, stayed at a beautiful resort. I
didn't feel like I got to really meet the people. But
here in Australia, and I would say in many Western countries,
we have people from all over the world and
we have this incredible opportunity to
connect with them, to learn from them and to bring their
natural resources into our classrooms. And
a lot of these parents and grandparents, they want
to share, you know, If
you come from another country and you've come all
the way to a country that speaks a dramatically different language, lives
dramatically different kind of style of life, it's
not only an honor and a privilege, but it's just
so nice to be able to acknowledge a totally
different way of life that they have come from and their children
and their grandchildren. So it's beautiful
to honor that in our schools, in our centers, family
daycare centers, and in our homes. And there's lots of ways we
can do that by inviting friends to share different cultural things.
But as a teacher, something that I really enjoyed
doing was bringing people in, um, family
members, mothers, fathers, grandparents, to speak
about their experience in different countries and come to share different things,
whether it's a song, whether it was some delicious
food or they even got to cook some special food
from different countries. There are schools where I
have seen doing a cultural expose where
they're doing a beautiful expo, children picking different countries
and getting to share all different things. But in terms of
some DIY resources, One
of my absolute favorite activities, geography
activities to do with children, is to create
a collage of the world. And it is free
and easy. It literally didn't cost me a
cent for this geography project that
I did with children that lasted months. And
they got to come back to it and they kept adding and adding and adding to it.
So what I did was I wanted to create a
massive map of the world, but I wanted it to be
a visual map of the world. So I went to
a shop that sold blinds and I asked if
they had any cutoffs. Sure enough, they had
plenty. And one of the cutoffs was maybe
four metres by two metres. So it was a huge piece
of canvas. And I
painted the background blue and
we outlined all of the different continents. And
I went to my local travel store and I
asked them, do you have any magazines that you don't use?
Because travel stores always have magazines
that are outdated. whatever the tours were to
Rome the year before, it's updated. It's got a new price
or whatever it may be. And so they have all of these magazines. So
I brought these magazines from all over the world in
a big box. I had glue and I had scissors.
The only two things that probably cost me money, but I already had a lot of those resources. And
we had this massive map of the world and different children got
to choose different continents. Asia, Africa,
North or South America, Europe, Australia, Antarctica. And
they got to cut out the pictures that they thought visually showed
the continent, the beauty and the wonders, the people, the food.
And lo and behold, after several months,
because they worked on it maybe for half an hour here or half an hour there,
We had this incredibly beautiful canvas
that was this visual map of the world of some of
the most beautiful places you can imagine. But what was amazing
about this process was like the
saying goes, the journey. it's
not about the destination. Because the children would ask
so many questions. Why are the rocks that
colour in this country? And where is this? And why is
the water formation like that? And why are
they dressing like that? And where is this from? And We
did so much deep and meaningful learning, which was
from the children's interest, which we know their brains activated
when they're interested and they're engaged and they're asking questions. We
did so much beautiful, deep and meaningful learning around all
of these countries, these landmarks about the
natural landscapes, the people, the food, the culture, the
customs, the religious traditions. so many
of these things through these beautiful images that sparked the
interest of the children. It was such a fabulous project
and I've done it replicated in different ways in
different schools around Australia that I've worked in but
it's one of my favourite go-to experiences that
you can bring in a world of learning by
obviously asking parents, asking grandparents, but also creating
this beautiful visual display and exploring the questions that the
children have of different things from different countries and
continents along the way. So Montessori,
I have to do a shout out to their, one
of the most amazing materials because Maria Montessori was
brilliant in the way that she created materials that
were very hands-on and interactive and child led. And
the Montessori globe that children, even as
toddlers start with, is a world globe
that just has blue silky paint for the water
and rough sandpaper for land. And that's what they start
with. Here is the water and here's the land. That's what our
world's made up of. The next continent goes the
next globe goes to the continents. So rather
than having all of the
countries broken up to the hundreds of countries and children having to
figure out all these countries, it's just Asia, Africa,
North and South America, Europe, Australia, Antarctica. And the
children get to explore these by having different
color codes for each of the continents. And each
of these continents then have their own little folder and
you can have special pictures of food and people and
religious traditions and landscapes from all these different countries that
are color coded back to the continent. And then an
object box with fun little things, whether it's magnets or
little artifacts from those countries. and it's a fun way
of having something in the classroom that children can explore different
parts of the world and they can build up on it with magazines just
like you made a you could make a poster you can make little things to
add to the folder as well and it gives them that little sense of um
I, you know, I feel like a little bit of independence that
they're contributing to it. In the same way, we'll get to
ABC letter mastery resources in another episode, but
you can do the same thing, exploring countries of
different, of different letters, animals, foods
from around the world. And you can break these into all of
the letters from A to Z. And it's a fun way to explore the
letters and practice the letters by exploring the world around
you as well. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you
for tuning in. Please, if you can do our
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