WAP 5 - Global Citizenship: Google Earth and Touchable Earth

I really enjoyed the opportunity to plan a lesson around the theme of global citizenship. At the preschool level I feel like that is all about noticing the ways we are all the same, even though we may be different. We can lay the foundation for this understanding and begin to build in our students the empathy that Alan November reported is a highly desired skill in the workplace.  I started my lesson by reading one of my favorite books, “We Are All Alike… We Are All Different,” by the Cheltenham Elementary School Kindergarteners. 

Then we talked about ways the children in our classroom are the same and different.  I eventually steered the discussion to how we live in different towns but go to the same school.  To demonstrate, I plugged my laptop into the smartboard, and we looked up Google Earth. We used the search and flyover features of Google Earth to compare where children lived in relation to our school. The children loved flying in and out of the towns they live in and ending up at Mount Hope. 

We noticed that their towns were all next to each other.  That’s why they can all come to the same school.  But what about kids in different parts of the world?  What schools to they go to?  Are their schooldays the same or different from ours?  How are they the same and different from us?

We explored the Touchable Earth website to answer these questions. Touchable Earth is an interesting website (and a mobile app available on ipad and iphone) by kids for kids that shows how children live in different parts of the world. There are short videos of children introducing and explaining  different aspects of their lives, organized around the topics of culture, facts, family, friends, play and school. There are many faraway places represented, and we investigated the school and play information of children in South Africa - after first flying there via Google Earth to show just how far away it was from Burlington.

My students were very engaged as we met, via video, as an assortment of South African school children telling about their daily lives.  We focused on the videos about their school and the games they play, and they loved noticing what was similar and what was not.  

Afterwards, I had my preschoolers document what they learned by drawing a picture of what they noticed was the same and what they noticed was different between them and the children of South Africa.  I was so pleased with the results!  Not only were many of my students successful using the higher order thinking skill of compare and contrast, but they were also very interested in the assignment.   

(Check out more student work here.)                                  

I hope to investigate many more places in the same way and maybe even ultimately make our own videos to introduce the world to the children of the Orange Room!