Aspirational Holiday Gifts

My grandfather believed in aspirational rather than age- appropriate gifts. Of all the holiday and birthday presents I received while growing up, the one I most vividly remember was the fountain pen and mechanical pencil set my grandfather gave me, when I was five. My initials even were embossed on both the pen and pencil in gold.

     What are some aspirational gifts that would inspire young people to learn more about the world? A globe is my favorite. It shows the world is round and countries are their correct relative sizes to each other, unlike on some two-dimensional maps, where Greenland is as big as Africa. Globes show the world has more than 200 countries, three oceans, and seven continents, one of which is frozen. A child can put a sticker on where he or she was born and lives.

     If a child already owns a globe, there is the Atlas of Animal Adventures that shows where animals live. Children can go from the book to the globe to find the country habitats of their favorite animals.

     Even in this digital age of email, children feel very grown up, when they receive mail. With a subscription to National Geographic Kids (shop.nationalgeographic.com/ category/magazines/national-geographic-kids), they receive a magazine nearly every month. Adults also will look forward to the world's fun facts, activities, photos, and games in each issue.

     Little Passports (littlepassports.com) is another way to give children mail every month. Each mailing provides activities, souvenirs, letters from fictional pen pals, and other fun ways to learn about a particular country.

     Presenting a child with a $25 kiva (kiva.org) gift card enables a child to loan someone in one of 80 countries the funds to improve a life. With the help of an older person, a child can scroll through the faces of people who need just a little help to plant a crop, open a store, or build something. And it is up to the child to decide where to offer his or her loan. They then receive email messages telling the amounts of every loan repayment.

     And finally, to advance a student's budding interest foreign languages or foreign travel, I'd suggest Other Wordly: Words Both Strange and Lovely From Around the World  by Yee-Lum Mak and illustrated by Kelsey Garrity-Riley and the series: The 500 Hidden Secrets of London, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Paris, and The 500 Hidden Secrets of Barcelona.

     None of these aspirational gifts will choke children under three (I hope), but they will give them a head start in feeling comfortable in the world where they will spend their lives.

   

Map Gazing

Before the internet, classrooms often had a set of encyclopedias. One of my fifth grade classmates decided he would read all 15 volumes of the Britannica Jr. that our room had. He started at the end. Not only did the last volume cover subjects that began with "WXYZ," but it also contained an atlas. He started looking at maps and never got any further.

     I was reminded of how interesting he found maps, when I read about a new book, Mapping It Out. One of the maps included in this book is a map of Africa that I used to hang in my classroom. To illustrate the size of Africa, this map fits China, the United States, Europe, India, and Japan inside the continent. This kind of presentation is very useful, since transferring a global world to a flat page distorts the size of countries north and south of the equator (See the earlier post, "You Are Here.").

     Having an Atlas, or a shower curtain with a map printed on it, is especially helpful when countries, islands, cities, mountains, and bodies of water are in the news. Hearing that Narendra Modi from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became India's Prime Minister sent me to an Atlas, when I heard he was born in Ahmedabad, a coastal city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, south of Pakistan. As host to some World Cup soccer games in 2014, the city of Recife shifted our focus from the Amazon in the west to Brazil's eastern tip on the Atlantic Ocean. When hearing that Stephen Hung ordered $20 million dollars worth of Rolls Royces (30 cars) to transport visitors staying at his Louis XIII resort in Macau, the question arose: Where is Macau? Unfortunately, invasions, such as Russia's into Ukraine, and disasters, such as the downing of Malaysian Flight MH17 and the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 and the finding of its wreckage on the island of Reunion (See the earlier post, "Who Needs International Expertise?"), cause us to visit the border of Ukraine and Russia and to contemplate the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

     Children can look at maps to pick out shapes (See the earlier post, "How the World Shapes Up."), to find where people practice different religions (See the earlier post, "Respect the Faith."), to have an international scavenger hunt (See the earlier post, "Games Children Play."), and to study currents, mountain elevations, count time zones, and plan where they want to visit and work (See the earlier posts, "See the World" and "What Do You Want to Be?"). Also, check out Maps4Kids.com, which has a wide variety of activities associated with maps.