Create a Calendar and Learn a Little About Other Cultures at the Same Time

I volunteer with the local Italian girl/boy and cubscout chapter I my home town, and one of the most creative activities I’ve had the opportunity to present to these young leaders of tomorrow is a challenge to create a multi-cultural calendar that will highlight 12 cultures of their choosing. What’s so memorable, isn’t the inventiveness the scouts employ to create a calendar, it was the things they learned about different cultures over the course of their project. I’m convinced more than ever that whether it’s a girl/boy/cub scout or a student there’s something to be gained in the simplicity of this activity.

I wish I could claim responsibility for this one, but the originator’s identity has been lost like a lot of other things I seem to forget more of these days. But it doesn’t matter. Any time I can disguise actual learning in the form of a fun activity or project I feel like I’ve scored a point for educators everywhere. In this case, like I mentioned earlier; it’s a project for the kids to create a calendar of different cultures. I hoped that by selecting 12 cultures different from their own, the kids would learn that at heart – men and women, boys and girls, young and old the world over aren’t really that different.

That was the goal of this mini journey of self-discovery. I wanted this group to create a calendar and search through magazines and books for photographs, articles and poems. Anything that created an image that would be the basis for a particular culture and a particular month. For example, to create a calendar with a month selected for Italy, a kid might use photos of spaghetti, or photos of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, or quotes from his many speeches. Or America might be profiled with photos of the American Indian when the students create a calendar with this theme.

Further more; I wanted the kids to realize home many cultures are – for better or worse – based on stereotypes. And last but not least when it came time to present the calendar they created – to try and bring in foods or other items that would supplement their presentation.
That was the philosophy I tried to impart on these young whipper-snappers when it came time for them to create their calendar. The technical aspects, by this I mean the materials the students needed to create a calendar were fairly simple and low on the budget:

âÂ?¢ Twelve pieces of 8 1/2″ x 11″ drawing paper
� One wrap-around 11 x 17 piece of construction paper
� Twelve blank calendar pages
� Art materials to include colored pencils, glue sticks, scissors, tape, etc.
� Magazines and other reference sources that can be cut out and eventually pasted.

Each of the 12 months will have an accompanying title page (hence the blank pages) that will display all the different elements of each particular culture. One of the challenges I presented the kids was that they had to find important dates specific to each culture that could be included in the calendar. I wasn’t letting these kids off that easy! They had to do some research on this one. I wanted to know if the 5th of October had any special meaning for the Irish or if 12 December meant anything for the Apache Indians. Oh, and too make things extra difficult, each student had to have 12 cultures different from the others. No sharing of ideas or materials! (Truth be told, when I tossed that one out the group I they about had a Chernobyl melt-down. So we decided this would be a group project).

And so – armed with the right tools, materials and information – the kids set to work to create a calendar in which they had a vested interest. I, in the meantime, sat back and watched the magic begin to happen.

Each youngster had to research cultures they knew absolutely nothing about! One group had picked the Incan culture, another Spanish, another – a tribe in Africa. To create a calendar in which each culture was depicted as unique and different would be truly a challenge!

The students that had to glue their illustrations and other reference materials and the calendar sheet on a piece of 11″ x 17″ construction paper. Then they had to fold and staple the pages in the middle to create the calendar. Before binding the sheets, I had each group make copies as well, so each child would have a copy of their calendar to take home. As a bonus project I offered the groups a chance to create special covers for their calendars as well displaying a montage of the many cultures found in their calendars.

This project carried over for 2 weekends and by the end of the activity, each group had to present their calendar and recount some of the specific they had learned: what some of the important cultural dates were, interesting characteristics of the culture, what some of the stereotypes of the cultures were that perhaps they thought were true but actually weren’t.
The most enjoyable part for me is that the presentations sparked debate. I had to laugh seeing the representation of America and some other cultures but the laughter was bitterweeet as it’s easy to see how much the media impacts a yougsters perceptions.

But more good came out of this than bad. On a lot of levels, people really are pretty much the same the world over and a project as simple does a good job of proving it.