ways will make children curious about the effects of the different representations and keen to create their own ways of presenting effectively. 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.

Lesson ideas include: Earth Day, Social Studies communities (macro to micro), global citizenship, text features, math statistics and ratios, etc. A. Times, and the Associated Press, among others, have acknowledged Smith and the success of his curriculum.

Collecting data and organising data They thought about questions they could ask such as: How much pocket money do you get each week? If you keep these few simple (and most of them, obvious) rules in mind, speaking in another country and meeting people from another culture is an enriching experience.

are often hard for children to comprehend, to grasp (and yes, even adults often have trouble with this). 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. Younger children may not understand all of it, especially the numbers but the idea of a global village is a great lesson to teach our children. Archival photos and Arlene Alda’s photographs of the tenement museum’s recreated period rooms carry much of the weight of the book, but Granfield’s lively annotations and mini-essays are equally informative.

When statistics are given out of a hundred it is much easier to grasp the information, especially for our young learners. It could also be used alongside a fiction text to inform children about the real-life context of the novel. To his credit, he has some concrete advice for teachers and parents, like having a world map in the room, playing geography games, and making pen pals from different countries. Reducing the world to a village enables the author to break problems down into manageable statistics.

I'm eager to read the author's If America Were a Village: A Book about the People of the United States! Written by David J Smith, If The World is a Village paints a picture of the world population as just a village of 100 people. Smith, in an effort to make this number, and all the many confusing facts and figures about the world's population - where we come from, what languages we speak, how our resources are distributed - more comprehensible, imagines the world as a village of one hundred people in this fascinating picture-book. The rate of growth of the global village means that there will probably be 250 people in the village by the year 2100. This beautifully illustrated and unique book, revised and updated for 2018 onwards, explains facts about the world’s population in a simple, non-political and fascinating way.He has also written five other books -- "If The World Were A Village", which was published in March, 2002, by Kids Can Press in Toronto, and "The CEESA Web-Site Manual" and "Emergency Procedures Handbook for International Schools" were published respectively in 1998 and 2003 by the US State Department. Neither gloom-and-doom nor artificially optimistic in its outlook, both positives and negatives are equally strongly presented, always striving for balance, making this lushly illustrated, informative picture book, making If the World Were a Village a perfect teaching/learning tool for either at-home or in-class use.