International Fair at Garfield Primary School

The girls had international day at their school on Friday, and it was absolutely AMAZING!!!  Lauren wore her red, white and blue.  Alison was all set with her patriotic dress, but she changed her mind and decided to wear her uniform instead.

As PTA secretary, I had some of the inside scoop on the preparations, etc, but I had no idea what to expect, and it was way better than I expected!!!  The day started with an international assembly.  The children were meant to come to school in dress that reflected their country or heritage, so there were so many amazing and interesting outfits that I saw when I would dropping the girls at school.  Each class selected 2-3 members of their class to stand up at the assembly and talk about their country, and/or say something in the language of their country.  Drew and I stayed for most of the assembly, but he was getting a little wiggly, so we missed the older children.  Several of them said hello or counted to 10, but there were several languages I didn't recognize.  Their school is one the most diverse in the area with over 30 countries represented and over 40 different languages spoken.

After the assembly, there were many activities for the students to participate in, led by parents primarily.  Lauren's class year had the opportunity to play the african drums, paint Easter eggs with a Polish parent and learn a game from Ghana.  A few of the other activities were painting paper mache globes, listening to Pinocchio in Italian and learning a hungarian dance.  After lunch, each class learned 3 different languages, also taught by parent volunteers.   There were 12 different parent volunteers, each teaching a different language, including Mandarin, French, Urdu and Africanse.  How cool is that!!

After school, the food stalls were open, and parents prepared food to represent their countries and it was all fabulous!!  There was some really delicious food that I tasted, and lots of other food that looked amazing (If only I could have sampled everything!).  There were probably at least 20 different countries represented.

For the USA table, we made popcorn and chocolate chip cookies, which were a big hit.  The Britain table had quite a spread of course, as well as the Poland table.  After eating, there were several different games set up to help kids practice languages, geography and recognizing flags of different countries.  And the last activity was a disco, where the kids could dance!  Lauren was off with her friends for the majority of the time.

And after we counted to money and cleaned up, we headed to the pub!!  With the kids at 6:30 on a Friday night!  It was quite a great way to end a successful International Fair.  And that would never happen in America.