We’ve had two culture days at our house – one El Salvador, one Kenya. The boys we sponsor are from El Salvador, and we recently simplified to save for a water project in Kenya with The Overflow Project. In seeking ways to make these endeavors more personal and tangible for our kids, we set aside a day to learn more about their cultures

Here are some elements to have a culture day of your own:

Kenya Day: unfortunately my Kenya map is upside down. Woopies (as Bronson would say).

• Study a map of the world and of the specific country.
• Listen to some music. We borrowed Putumayo Kids’ CDs from our library – Latin Playground and African Playground. I suspect you could find some music on YouTube as well.
• Make a flag. I printed coloring sheets from this site, and used wooden dowels (79 cents for a bag at Renys) to make them into flags.
• Read some children’s books. Again, the library is an awesome source! We read For You are a Kenyan Child and Planting the Trees of Kenya, but had a harder time finding El Salvador books. We looked at pictures in a book too old for them.
• Practice saying simple words in the country’s native language.
• Watch a video. YouTube has a clip for everything! We also watched community videos provided by World Vision for our sponsored boys. My kids loved clips of other kids, especially if they were singing.
• If I had planned far in advance I could have ordered some coins from these countries, or you could look at photos of their currency online.
• Finally, at dinner, we ate some “authentic” food from each country. I found a few recipes from Pinterest, and cooked away! Oli will eat anything, and Bronson at least tried each meal. In fact, Bronson told me the Kenyan meal (that he tried, but refused to eat) was his favorite part of Kenya day!