One cool activity that I did with my favorite little school was the OneWorld Classroom art exchange. It's a pretty neat program where you register a classroom, have the kids draw scenes from their lives / culture / family, send the artwork to the U.S., then in a couple months (it takes a month for anything to get to/from Guatemala) you get a new packet with artwork from all over the world. So once I received all of the artwork I took it into the school and used it to jumpstart a little geography/cultural awareness lesson. One thing that I found in this school was a real lack of both geographical knowledge and knowledge of other cultures. I discovered this when I asked the kids (of grades 1-6) to draw their culture or what was special about Guatemala I got blank stares (and it wasn't because of my Spanish). This is when I realized that it is impossible to know what is so special about your own culture until you know about other cultures.
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| Looking at some of the new artwork |
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| Showing where the different pieces of artwork came from |
Here is a list of some of the things that I find to be special about the Guatemalan culture:
- Over 90% of people in my village are Mayan and speak the language K'iche'
- The majority of women in this area wear the traditional embroidered traje
- Tortillas and tamalitos are staples of any meal and often they are made by hand and cooked over an open stove
- Large multigenerational families live together
- Much much more this is just the tip of the iceberg!!
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