Geography day!

Katie has a friend in town from Germany so we decided to take a detour and teach geography. Her friend graciously brought two small maps and a blow up globe with her so we had a few teaching tools. The maps were in German which was a bit interesting, but the materials were a hit. My new roommate brought with her a old National Geographic atlas/picture book that was also a great addition. They do not have any materials in the classrooms to teach, no maps or globes, or even textbooks in most schools. So they spent almost two hours looking at every picture in the book and I did my best to point out the "important" countries on the blow up globe.

We also did a quick overview about what America was like. We tried to do our best but it is hard to come up with generalizations about how people live in America. It seems that the culture here (from at least an outsiders view) is much more homogenous than at home. We came up with about 15 generalizations. The two most shocking facts that the kids learned about America was that we went to high school for free and that there were no Zebras. We told them that we didn't have zebras, lions, tigers, rhinos, or elephants and it totally blew their minds. They pay for every school that they attend, including nursery and primary school, and the cost of education has broad effects on their lives (a subject for a different post). None of them have been more than an hour from their home and without picture books and resources in school they have a very limited idea about what life outside of Tanzania is like. I would say that geography day was a hit, although we didn't do much than let them spill over the resources.