Featured Article: A Trip Around the World

Let’s take one more vacation before returning to school. This vacation will take us all around the world without even leaving our home. Well, except for a trip to the library. With summer break winding down and days spent at the pool numbered, it’s time to reflect on a wonderful summer. Did you relax by the pool? Spend days with friends or family? Go on a vacation? Participate in your library’s summer reading program?

Regardless of how you spent your summer break, there is still time for a little exploring. While exploring the world can be expensive and take quite a bit of planning, you can explore different continents through the books at your library. Imagine having breakfast in Brazil or walking with family through the streets of Paris. You can imagine both through literature and this week’s reading list lets you explore different countries. Within this list you can read about different customs, lifestyles, and cultures.

Books about other places allow us the ability to consider a different life than our own. For children, it is a positive way of showing them that while globally we may be different, we all share in the human experience. Children can read about other children, on the other side of the world, who share in their own same experiences, such as going to school, riding a bike, eating meals with family.

Ready for that trip around the world now? Now is the perfect time to get in that one last trip with the family. A trip that costs next to nothing, yet takes everyone around the world. In addition to exploring the many books at your library, why not engage in the trip even more by sharing in culturally diverse meals and a little foreign language learning. How about hanging up a world map and pinning the different countries you are reading about, including Post-it notes with the most fascinating fact you learned about each country? While hanging out at the house you could have some ambience music from one of the countries. By the time your world wind trip is over, your kids will have lots of new facts to share.