I actually don't know when Hannah has been so excited about a project as she is about our various swapping projects.
HSA is a Facebook group. The other members seem to be mainly in the US, but there are a good few in the UK and one who sometimes lives in Bulgaria. The swaps give us the opportunity to learn about how other families live in different parts of a country or of the world. First up is the Flat Traveller project. We are swapping with a family in Iowa and our traveller, a dalmatian (of course..Hannah chose it!) is ready to go with his passport which will go with him on each adventure to collect stickers or stamps and a journal for this specific journey. The journal contains questions about his host family and their daily life, their town and so on and spaces for them to fill in anything they want as he goes out and about with them
In return, we will host a traveller from them. It;s really exciting planning what to do with our "guest". Fortunately she or he's picked a good month to come. We have visits planned to 2 museums and a university department of Physics and Astronomy, 2 science fairs to attend and a whole host of family birthdays and their attendant social occasions. If it arrives before next Saturday it can even watch Hannah dancing in a St Patrick's Day celebration as well as all the usual activities and classes she does.
She has been hugely enthusiastic about making the traveller and all his paperwork and also about learning the geography involved. We have printed out a map of the US (can add a world one if we get swaps with families from outside the US) and the plan is to colour each state our traveller visits. Brilliant way to learn some geography as well as make new friends.
The other swap is a Box Swap, where we prepare a shoe box of information about the place we live (God I am so glad to live in London...there's just such a lot to say about it!!) and this month we are swapping with a family in Pennsylvania. We started to look a bit at our states for this month (well, to be honest..I read what Stephen Fry did on his trip around America) and Hannah was very impressed with Pennsylvania's role in the birth of the USA so we look forward to learning a lot more.
here
Finally, there's the birthday card swap, where anyone signed up sends a home made card to every child whose birthday falls that month. Hannah's is next month. I haven;t told her about the card bit yet (which probably means that for March I'll have to make the cards myself) but can;t wait to see her face when she gets loads of cards in the post!
You can read about our Flat Traveller adventures here
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