Open your students’ minds
If you want your students to grow to be accepting and understanding of others, it’s a good idea to teach them about different people, places, languages and cultures. Do it early in their educational careers, before they’ve started to form stereotypes or negative impressions about people of different races or religions.
If you’re completing a history unit, or even a math unit or a language unit, why not give it an international theme? It’s not hard to teach mathematics or science with an international twist – you can do so in conjunction with teaching your children how others live their lives in this huge world we share.
Explore the countries of the world
Here is a free student passport that you can give to your students at the beginning of the school year or semester when you are planning on studying different countries and cultures.
- Download and print out, then photocopy and distribute a copy of the passport to all of the children in your class. Show your students how to assemble the passport to resemble a booklet.
- Have your students fill out the personal information on the first inside page of the passport – their names, genders, birthplaces and nationalities. They can glue or tape a picture of themselves into the passport or, if there are no photos of your students available, have them draw a picture of themselves in the photo box with crayons or colored pencils.
- Whenever you start to study a particular country or region, have your students choose a Visas page and draw an arrival stamp under the Entries column. Alternatively, if you have country-themed ink stamps, you can use those.
- Study the country of your choice. Have fun! Teach your students to respect the cultures of others, even if they are wildly different from their own.
- When you’ve finished studying your country, have your students create a departure stamp under the Departures column on the same page of the passport as they added their initial arrival stamp.
Language and culture activities
For third and fourth grade students, you can use this passport in conjuction with the free Mathbooking – France Journal math problems booklet, that features individual factoids about life in France with each question. For older students you can use this passport when playing the free Flags of the World matching game.