Race Around the World

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The Census Bureau lists over 25 Asian and Pacific Islander groups in our population of more than 300 million people.

Asian Pacific Americans number more than 15 million or about 5 percent of that total. These countries Some of the largest groups are: Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipinos, Indian, Pakistani, Korean, Japanese, Cambodian, Laotian, Indonesian, Thai, Taiwanese, and a variety of Pacific Islanders from the Hawaiian Islands, Polynesian Islands, and New Zealand.

Help your students learn about Asian or Pacific countries in preparation for a class "race." To begin, select four or five Asian or Pacific countries you would like the students to study as a class. Then have the students read the CultureGrams Kids Edition reports for those countries. This may be done during class time or as homework assignments, spread out over several days.

Have each student create quiz questions about his or her country based on the reading. The students should not make the questions too difficult, as the questions may be asked of members of their own team during the upcoming Race Around the World activity. Compile the questions together and distribute them to the class to allow students to prepare. You may wish to have some as "questions of the day" in the lead-up to the activity.

Mark a number of cities as "pit stops" on a world map. The students' hometown should be the first and final pit stop.

For the Race Around the World, divide the students into teams. Each team should be represented by a symbol on the world map (e.g., different-colored airplanes). In turn, ask each team a question from those the class has submitted.

With each correct answer, the team's marker should be moved to the next "pit stop" on the map. The first team to travel around the globe to the original destination wins the game.