Davan has given herself a challenge to write a report on every country in the world. She's done several already and is just devoting a page to each. On one side is the written report and on the other is a drawing of the country.
Here are two of her reports, showing alternate sides.
She's keeping all her reports in this shoe box, with a list of all the countries for which she's completed the reports.
So far, she's done: Indonesia, Finland, Eritrea, Bahrain, Latvia, Cuba, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, Sweden, Iceland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Taiwan and Denmark. As you can see, there is no particular order aside from an interest or availability of books.
Along the way, she's added rules. She's decided that her facts have to come from books. The main thing is that she felt like watching a program about a country and then writing about it wasn't enough.
Just from this project, she's covered an amazing range of "subjects" from geography to politics to culture studies to writing to art. What's been interesting to me, though, is the difference in our conversations these days. Davan has always been able to carry on a conversation about nearly any topic with her dad and I, being a good critical thinker and all, but this morning, over Snickers Pancakes, our conversation drifted from bike riding to Denmark to politics in general and Davan was able to contribute facts that were new to me, like just how much the average Denmark citizen pays in taxes. All I knew was that it was high.
I love being surprised like that. It's not like it's the first time she's known something I don't, but I've expected it in areas such as linguistics or, you know, technical terms for aerial arts, but politics is a new one. It's fun.
But how will you know she's learning?!
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This is awesome. I think the best way to learn something is to fall in love with it. Geography is something so many people haven't a clue about. Good for Davan.
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