UN DAY COUNTRY RESEARCH PROJECT

"From states across the countries
 From countries across the land
 United Nations helps the world
 And lends a helping hand."
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     Every year at SRS the third grade celebrates UN Day on October 24th with a multicultural lunch. Parents are invited and students display projects and posters in the hallway for all to see. I decided that my students would each spend a significant amount of time reading about and researching a specific country in order to create a poster displaying both factual information and interesting cultural insights.

     Each student was assigned a country based on preference and reading ability. They each submitted a "top three" list of countries and I sorted through the literature to find material suitable to their reading level. However, once a student finished working on their original country, they were able to choose another country without attention to reading level of the book. My reasoning for this was to ensure that all students could all finish their original research project without struggling through the literature. At the same time I kept in mind the role that motivation and interest can have in allowing students to challenge themselves with material that my be more difficult for them to work with if they had no interest in the subject.

     The students were given an order in which to work, which included the original researching and note-taking (for which they were provided graphic organizers), a rough draft of their poster, an editing phase and a final copy of their poster. Additionally, there was a Countries of the World station in the room where the books were separated by continent, thus requiring the students to remember which continent their country was in, as well as flags and pictures from the countries and extra copies of the graphic organizers and requirements sheet.

     The requirements for the project were that each student create a poster for their country which showed five general facts (population, map, flag, capital and language) as well as five interesting facts or cultural insights written in sentence or paragraph form. They were also encouraged to add color and pictures to their posters. In addition to creating the posters for the bulletin board, the students also created flags to decorate the hallway with. Below you will find some of the final products as well as a Microsoft Word document with the relevant project materials. Enjoy!

Here is our bulletin board displaying most of the final posters!

This student studied France and added a lot of text and pictures.

She also spent time in France during the summer before third grade

so she added her own personal photographs to the bottom of the poster.

This poster is from a student who had a very large interest in

studying Italy and was also part Italian. He brought in

some Italian money and also chose to add a large

amount of pictures and images to his poster.

Here is an example of the interesting cultural facts that a student wrote about England (with teacher corrections).

Place your mouse over the image to see the back page of paper.

Here are a few of the flags that the students drew for the hallway decorations!

     The day before UN Day a sharing session was held in the classroom using a double rotating circle format. Each student had his/her own poster and would share with the person across from them. After a few minutes I would ding a bell and the outside circle would move clockwise and they would share with their next partner. This continued for approximately 25 minutes until we had to stop for lunch. The purpose of this meeting was to have the students not only share what they had learned and produced with their peers, but to also practice explaining their posters to others in case they were asked about them the following day.

Here are some pictures from the event.

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Click here for project materials (in MS Word)