If the World Were a Village

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Parts of the book are a bit dark, but, that's how the world is and it doesn't make too much sense to hide the disparity in circumstances from children. Using 100 as a base number, the book shows the world population in terms of the following elements: nationalities, languages, ages, religions, food, air and water, schooling and literacy, money and possessions, electricity, the population of the past, and the population of the future. This information could also of course be recorded on small devices (such as Talking Tins or Talk-Time Postcards) which could be sited next to the displays. David is also the creator of the award-winning curriculum Mapping the World by Heart and the author of If, If America Were a Village and This Child, Every Child.

By taking large, almost unfathomable numbers and shrinking them to a "village" of 100, the ideas of what our global citizens experience become more manageable and easier to understand. Activity 2 Then I asked the children to complete some data handling sessions where they could apply what they had learnt. Helps children (and adults) catch a glimpse of what life is like around the world by imagining there are 100 people and then telling how many of them have enough food to eat, where they live, what languages they speak, etc. There are obvious cross-curricular links with Geography and PSHE here, as the data in the book really make us think about the haves and have-nots of our world, the differences between countries and peoples, and also what unites us all. This picture book is still very informative, but it displays the information without overloading readers with long paragraphs.

Some of the pages in the book are easier to interpret and represent than others, so there's some natural differentiation. In the past 15 years she has been awarded work by the Royal Canadian Mint (including three commemorative coins for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games coin collection), Canada Post and many book and magazine publishers. I was fortunate enough to grow-up in a fairly affluent part of California and I still remember the first time we took a trip to the mid-west. Shelagh Armstrong is a freelance commercial artist who has designed adult book covers, stamps and commemorative coins .

He achieved recognition for his unique method of teaching seventh graders to draw maps of the entire world from memory, now published by Fablevision as a highly successful curriculum, "Mapping The World By Heart". For example, when he speaks of world religions he connects the Muslims to their minaret, the Christians to a bell tower, and the Buddists to the gong.The result is a title that makes certain statistics - like the fact that only 24 out of 100 villagers always have enough to eat - far easier to understand, and far more "real" to readers, than they would otherwise have been. Granfield alternates concise histories of the Lower East Side, early immigration to America, and Ellis Island, with short chapters on four of the families who made 97 Orchard Street their home. Of course, I don't mean to compare a working class small town in Nevada or the air pollution of the Sacramento valley to the struggles in a small African village or the air pollution in Beijing, for example, but simply to say that even when children are not able to travel to other parts of the world, they can still develop an understanding of and sympathy to the differences in what people have and have not, and even starting within ones own "village," there is much room to cultivate "world-mindedness" and, as author David Smith says, "Knowing who our neighbors are, where they live and how they live, will help us live in peace.

The book If the world were a village is a good book and recommend it for teaching kids about the problems of the world and hope you enjoy this book as much as I do. The technique used is both traditional and up-to-date: lots of memorization, but not the old-fashioned methodology of rote-for-rote's-sake, but rather memorization informed and enriched by the real use of knowledge, study, practice, mnemonics, and games.

I rewrote the page that considered animals as food into a beautiful page that explains all the perils of humanities exploitation of animals for pleasure in numbers.

It offers an eye-opening look at a cross-section of global society, along with the demographic information behind it.

Not only does this book encourage young readers and learners to think more globally, it also brings a certain air of refreshing reality. David was born in the United States, but is a permanent resident of Canada; he and his wife live in North Vancouver, BC. It's also a good way for students to practice and examine real world applications of the number 100 (for younger students) or proportions and comparisons (for older students).