Study holidays around the world. Teach children about traditions from other cultures with enjoyable holiday activities to celebrate events, such as Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa and Carnival. Make crafts related to these events and accompany each craft with a lesson about its significance.
Incorporate short foreign language lessons into everyday activities. Take time to give a brief lesson about counting in Spanish or French during math class, for example. Exposing children to foreign languages helps make them more globally aware.
Start a recycling project in your classroom. Give students a lesson about the importance of recycling and how they can help save the planet. Set up recycling bins. Brainstorm ideas as a class about how they can reduce, reuse and recycle.
Look at weather reports from around the world. Pick a different city every day to talk about after your local daily weather activity. Make it a point to show students where the city is on a map to increase their knowledge and understanding of the world.
Assign students a famous world landmark to research, such as the pyramids of Teotihuacan, the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu. Ask them to study the significance and story behind the famous landmark and present their findings to the class. Learning about famous landmarks can help increase their curiosity for the world around them.
Ask students to examine the contributing factors of global climate change. Instruct them to research factors, such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation and ozone depletion. Create a futuristic scenario of what the world might look like if these trends continue. Students can work independently or in small groups of two to five. This activity will expand their knowledge of the issues that affect the global environment today.
Emphasize geography in your lessons. Quiz the students throughout the school year on different regions of the world, such as Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. Give a prize at the end of the year to the student who can fill out a world map most accurately.
Make the students the ambassadors of the world. Tell them that they are in charge of running the world today. Ask them to take charge of current world issue, such as climate change and the economy. Pose the question: what would you do differently? Divide them into groups and instruct them to conduct research to support their decisions. This activity can get your students thinking proactively about world issues.