Yay, it’s International Day!

Last Thursday was a special day in the community of Flora Tristan. For the first time, HOOP organized an “International Day”. With the participation of all kids as well as many moms, HOOP’s International Day was a fun afternoon full of interesting information, fun competitions and practical activities.

HOOP volunteers were divided into groups and each group was assigned with the task of preparing a presentation and some extra activities about a specific continent. As the HOOP team is very international, there was at least one volunteer from each of the six continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania.

 

The idea of International Day was that the kids get the chance to “travel” the world in one day! To make this possible, the volunteers transformed each classroom into a different continent, decorating them with maps, flags, and pictures of the most typical dances, food, dressing styles, buildings, animals and so on. Besides that, for the older kids the volunteers created fun competitions such as quizzes related to the topics covered during the presentations, whereas for the younger ones, the volunteers designed practical activities such as drawing, painting and dancing.

In order to get everyone to visit the whole world, the kids were divided in groups according to their English level and travelled around the world rotating from one classroom to the next one, starting the journey in South America and finishing it in Asia. To make the whole experience more exciting for the kids the HOOP volunteers came up with the idea of making individual passports for each kid and stamp it for each continent they visited. It was lovely to see their happy faces getting a new stamp in their passports!

 

The event was both fun and also provided important geography knowledge to the children and their moms. While they had great fun with the idea of travelling around and getting to know new countries, the event also helped them to understand that each country has its own way of living and that cultural diversity is a positive thing. We will definitely organize another event like this and the kids can’t wait to travel the world again!

 

Written by Cayruã Fonseca