Look Inside: Traveling the World

Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldock Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a look inside our brand new curriculum, Traveling the World. When you purchase Traveling the World, you will receive a teacher's manual, an animal profile, a student notebook, a game pack, and a passport with coordinating passport flags. First up is the teacher's manual. The first page in the teacher's manual is the table of contents that is going to tell you all 30 of the countries you will be traveling to. Now these countries are listed on the product page, so I'm just going to list that in the description box down below instead of reading all 30 of them to you guys. Next, we have the page that tells you the required and suggested resources. There are two required resources for Traveling the World, the first of which being the Lonely Planet Kids Travel Book, and the second of which being the Global Art Activities, Projects, and Inventions from Around the World. Now, the Travel Book is 110% required. You have to have this book to complete the curriculum. The Global Art Book is highly, highly suggested. However, there are additional activities listed, so if you either cannot get your hands on this book or maybe your children really aren't into arts and crafts, the curriculum can be done without it and I'm going to show you how in just a little bit. This one is required. This one is highly suggested, but you don't have to have it. There are also suggested resources right here in the front, and these suggested resources are resources you can use throughout the entire course of Traveling the World. Most of them are books and games that are around the world, so they are relevant the entire time you are traveling, and all they will do is enrich your learning. All suggested resources are there to give you an idea, to do the thinking for you. None of them are required. The curriculum will still have your child learning whether you use them or not, but they're just there to help you with ideas. Next, we have a Traveling the World Checklist. Not every family likes to complete things in a specific time frame, so this allows you to complete things on your own time frame. You just simply list whatever country you're working on at the top, and basically once you've checked off all of the boxes, you're done with that country, and you can move on to the next one. You can do that in a day, a week, a month. You can put the things on the shelf in a basket or a bin and do it at your pace. Every single continent starts with a resource page. These resources, while suggested, will last the entire time that you are studying countries in that continent. There are non-fiction book selections. There are myths, legend, folks, and fairy tales. There are games and activities, and there are family movie night ideas. All of those things can be used again the entire time you're in that continent, so all of these are good for the whole five or six weeks that you are in Africa. Next up is what I like to call the meat and potatoes of the curriculum. Every single country has this same layout. For an example, we will be looking at Egypt. Here we have a Weekly Lesson Plan Checklist. The Weekly Lesson Plan Checklist breaks all the activities down into a five-day week for you. Now, they're listed as day one through day five, so you can choose to do that however you would like, whether that's a five-day week, whether that's two days this week and three days next week, or whether that is one day every week for five weeks. That is totally up to you, but basically on day one, you are going to welcome your family to a new country, find that country, in this case Egypt, on the map, and stamp your passport. You will also read page 94 in the travel book while your students color their coloring pages. On day two, they will watch the YouTube playlist, which is linked over here for convenience, and that playlist has things like introduction to the country, more information on the animal, more information on the landmark, national anthems, the geography of that country, and then you are also going to complete the flag profile page in the student notebook. On day three, you will do an activity of your choice or their choice and complete the country profile page in the student notebook. On day four, you will read the animal profile out of the animal profile book and complete the animal profile page in the student notebook. And day five, you will read a myth, legend, folk, or fairy tale based either in that country or that continent, and I have linked here World of Tales, which is a free option that has tons of different myth, legends, folks, and fairy tales that you can explore if you don't already have some that you like. You'll make a recipe together and play your choice of game or games. This page over here is going to have all of the suggestions and the information for you. There's a suggested book list up here at the top. Again, that is suggested. Those are picture books that either talk about or take place in that specific country, so those are all going to be really great picture books about Egypt. Here are the activities that they can choose from. One of them is the global art pages that correspond to this country, but there are also three additional options. This is where you can get away with not having that book. There is a postcard option, a snapshot option, and a steam building option. All of those are in the appendix, and I will show them to you momentarily. Here is your YouTube playlist. Everything here is clickable links, and the YouTube playlist includes a QR code to scan for convenience as well. At the bottom of this page here is a suggested recipe for each and every country. Every country is going to follow that same layout with the new continent having a resource when you get there. In the appendix, there are postcards, snapshots, landmark cards, and a final project. Here are those postcards that are an example of an activity you can do. If your child does not like arts and crafts and they may be like writing instead, you could have them draw and write a postcard to family or friends as one of their activities. If they would rather draw pictures or maybe even stage and take pictures, here's a snapshot page where they can do just that. They can draw pictures of the things they would have seen in that country, they can draw pictures of themselves doing the things that happen in that country, or they can like stage pictures of Legos or little dolls and tape them and scrapbook from that country. These are the steam landmark cards. There is a landmark for every single country and a cute little globe that tells you what continent it is from on there as well. There is a picture along with the name. There are multiple ideas listed in here for how you can use these. You can have your child build them from blocks, have them make a diorama, have them build them out of Legos. I am actually considering having Emily make a traveling the world world in Minecraft and recreating each of these so that at the end of traveling the world she would have a whole Minecraft world full of all of these amazing landmarks. And then the last thing in the appendix is a final report. So once you have finished traveling the world, you will have your child pick either their favorite country or the country they most want to visit and dig just a little bit deeper by doing a final report on that country. Next up we have the animal profiles. The animal profiles is basically one animal chosen from each country that is prominent to that country and we have done all of the research for you. You can do additional research and you can have additional books, but this way you don't have to have them. There is a realistic picture, there is facts about the animal, the animal's scientific name, adaptations that animal has to live where it lives, their predators, and their prey. And again there is one for all 30 of the countries. Next we have the student notebook. The student notebook is probably my favorite thing of them all. Each time you enter a new continent there will be a map for your child to color all the countries as you visit them. They will color in the different countries that you visit as you are heading there. There is a coloring page for each country. Each country's coloring page features the name of the country, the animal prominent to that country, and the landmark that we have featured on the landmark cards. These coloring pages are original and hand-drawn by my husband and I just have to tell you guys these are my favorite he has ever done and he's done some amazing ones. There is a flag profile page for every country. That page features the flag, the current flag, the year that it was adopted, its ratio or size, its usage whether it's national or civil or both, a little bit of information about its design, and a flag fact. The bottom half of the flag profile page is an outline of the flag so your child can color it to match what the flag actually looks like. Then we have a country profile page. The country profile page has the outline of the map where they will mark the capital city. If your child is a little bit older and you want to extend the map work you could have them do things such as major landmarks, rivers, mountains, etc. They will fill in the continent the country is located on, its capital city, its population size, its landmass, the life expectancy there, interesting facts and things to do and see. The animal profile page is where they will put all the information they learned about that animal from the animal profile book such as its name, its scientific name, they will illustrate the animal in its habitat, illustrate either its predator, prey, or both, and list all of the interesting animal facts they learned. And each country is set up in the same way. Once they have finished all of the countries in a specific continent there is a tails around the world page that they will complete. Because you have read myths, fairy tales, books, or legends throughout the course of each week, when you have finished all of the countries in a specific continent, in this case Africa, they will either narrate by writing down their favorite tale that you read, so they would draw a picture and write or recount that tale, or create their own tale based off of the things they learned from reading the tales. So basically here is a place for them to create their own African tale, or their own Asian tale, or their own North American tale when you get there. Next we have the passport. Now in the passport there is this page of passport flags. That is a flag for every single country that we will be visiting in traveling the world. You can choose to print it on regular printer paper and have your child cut it out and glue it into your passport, or you can choose to print on sticker paper and then create stickers out of them. That is your choice whether your child likes stickers or maybe needs some cutting practice. You can choose either way, but it is there for convenience. And then there is this little passport where they will fill out some information about themselves, and then these visa pages that have little stamps in them to make them more realistic. And you can have your child just put the flag stamp or sticker in there, glue it in, maybe write the date. I'm going to buy one of those little stamps where you actually stamp the date into the passport, the date that we're there, and you can have them write the country name or a fact. That's up to you how much you have them do, but this is just to add that little bit of fun hands-on experience of actually traveling the world. Last but most definitely not least, at least in our opinion, is the game pack. The game pack includes four different games to help give you variation while you are playing games each and every week. This way, if you cannot find or afford or get your hands on any of the games that are suggested in the curriculum, you have tons of different options to play while you learn and help just have fun together as a family while you're traveling. The first game is bingo. This bingo is where you will be matching the capital to the country. So here on your calling mat, you would have somebody do the calling, and if they called out Cairo, you would cover Egypt. I have included multiple different ways to play bingo to keep it fresh and exciting. The standard, you know, straight lines, the four corners, the entire blackout. I believe there is eight different ways to play listed, so that way there is tons of different exciting variations of playing and learning while you're doing it. The second game is memory or match, but this memory includes four different types of cards, again to give you multiple variations of gameplay. The first type of cards are cards that just list different country names. The second type of cards are cards that have the flags with the country names. The third type of cards have the animal with the country name. And the fourth type of card has a landmark with a country name. So you can play four different ways. You can play with the country name and the animal, with the country name and the flag, with the country name and the or you could play with all four and have to match all four in order to make a match. That way if you have older learners you're making it more advanced and more complex for them or as your learners are memorizing more and more and learning more and more you can make it you know more difficult and challenge them a little bit more. The third game is a Top Trumps style game. So I made a Top Trumps style card for each of the countries that are included that have different stats on them and if you are not familiar with Top Trumps it is basically a war type game where whoever has the highest stat or number in a specific stat wins. So this way you are playing learning the different stats and having fun at the same time. The last game in the game pack is a sorting style of game. So you're gonna use those same cards that you have from memory and you are going to sort the animals, flags, or landmarks by continent. So that way you're getting a little bit of hands-on and math work all at the same time. So for instance if we picked up the Fennec Fox which is from Egypt we know that that is Africa. The African dog obviously is from Africa as well but you would just have your child sort them and you can either just do one at a time or have them do all of them.