If the World Were A Village
Building Insights About the World's People (Virtual Tour)
Stage of Literacy Development:
Stage 3: Literacy for GrowthAges:
9-12
Grade Range:
4th 5th 6thFood Groups:
Primary: Knowledge Building
Transcript
As part of character education, the students in the class were given the task of helping to educate other kids with their place in the world. One of the ways we did that was we read the story If the World Were a Village by David Smith. In the book David J. Smith, helps the readers to understand exactly how we share resources in the world, how people are distributed over the land mass and he does this by comparing the percentage and the ratios as if the world was a village of 100 people. So on the board behind me, the students decided to portray the book in the different ways. For example, one group of students decided to show the different languages at a dinner table. So, the big long dining room table, each seat represents a different language that's spoken around the world. Another example is the model of the earth (the circular model of the earth) represents the different populations as percentages on landmasses. The purpose of reading this story was really similar to the purpose of reading the Obama book Of Thee I Sing and it's really to help students understand that they are not a lone person in the world, that the world is made up of a diverse population and that we're all connected to that and that we all play a part of that in a certain way. One of the really interesting way some of the students portrayed the information from the book was the posters with the little doors. Each of those doors represents a period of time and how the population of the world is represented in the village of 100 people in that period of time. So if you open each little door, you'll see how the population of the world is growing through each period. So we see that door number one, dates back to 1000 BCE and if the world were a village of 100 people, there would be one person. As we move through history and we move to 500 BCE, if the world were a village of 100 people there would be two people. As we jump through history, we can move into the future and projection show that if the world were a village of 100 people, in the year 2150, we're actually going to more than double that and we will have 250 people. One of the nice things the students did was to show this as a bar graph as well. When the students were given the task of taking the meaning of the book and showing it to the passers by in the hallway. The criteria they were given was to take the information from the book and show the rest of the school, but what I didn't do was tell them how they need to do that. All I did was tell them where the display would be. So everything on this board was created by the students and thats why each of the pieces of information is displayed a different way.
Related References
Natural Curiosity: A Resource for Teachers http://www.naturalcuriosity.ca/
Activity Objective
The goal of If the World Were A Village: Building Insights About the World's People (Virtual Tour) is to extend students experience and expose students to new concepts by using the book If the World Were A Village to study the world's people.
Quick Tips
Additional Comments:
- Creating meaningful learning experiences by studying world events promotes a motivation for learning and builds students' understandings of real life events.
- Inquiry learning fosters a student-driven experiential approach to learning.
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