Peace Corps World Wise Schools

Learn more

• Learn more about Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Central America, countries, Eastern Europe, geography, global education, Pacific Islands, service learning, South America, and world cultures.

Legal

The Coverdell World Wise Schools program offers engaging stories, classroom resources, and ideas for service projects based on the experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers around the world.This program contains a variety of great online resources for students and teachers. Let’s begin with the lesson plans! Designed for grades 3-5, 6-9, and 10-12, you will find an amazing collection of lessons that will take your students from Kenya to Tanzania and Bulgaria to Honduras:

• Building Bridges: Short, adaptable lesson plans and activities that build cross-cultural awareness, respect, and communication in your classroom.
• Looking at Ourselves and Others: Activities that challenge students to become more conscious of the values they share with their families, friends, and communities.
• New Uncommon Journeys: 11 essays by returned Peace Corps Volunteers with accompanying lessons about life in other cultures for 6th- through 12th-grade classrooms. The stories reach from Eastern Europe to Africa, from Central America to Asia.
• Water in Africa: A collection of resources from over 90 Volunteers serving in African countries, which include photos and stories, as well as lessons with standards-based learning units for K-12 students.
• Water-Borne Illnesses: Students will learn about how water becomes contaminated with specific water-borne diseases, read personal accounts of unsafe water, and work together to brainstorm solutions to the water problems of communities in Africa.
• Water Pressure: The purpose of this lesson is to look at water usage in the United States and Africa and to gain a clearer understanding of the problems facing both areas of the world as population increases and natural resources are stressed.
• Access to Safe Drinking Water: With questioning, problem-solving, critical thinking, and technology skills, this module guides students through the steps to examine and present their findings about access to safe drinking water in a community in Ghana, West Africa.
• Earth Day Activities: A set of lessons that concentrate on environmental issues and include the study of a particular country, its culture and geography.

For a unique way to expose students to other countries and cultures, sign up for the CyberVolunteer program. You will receive one e-mail per month, with a link to each new CyberVolunteer letter, its lesson plan, and supplementary links. Or try the Correspondence Match program, which links your class directly to a serving Peace Corps Volunteer.Other resources include archived primary resources from Peace Corps volunteers and country information that contains videos, maps, statistics, stories, and more.Students especially will enjoy a visit to the Global Cafe where they can learn what it is like to be a teenager in another country. They can also read stories and letters and look at snapshots that show life overseas as a Peace Corps Volunteer or check out the tools Peace Corps Volunteers use to prepare for their assignment overseas.