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Poland students soak in cultures of other nations
POLAND
Sixth-grade students at McKinley Elementary celebrated Nationality Day on Friday by dressing in country-specific clothes, cooking traditional ethnic foods and displaying artifacts that have been handed down in their families.
The celebration was a culmination of a nearly yearlong social-studies project in which students prepared a written report, usually 20 to 30 pages, about a country of their heritage. If students were unsure about their heritage, they chose any country, said teacher Linda Angelo.
Sixth-grader MacKenzie Holloway said it helped that the report was broken into smaller assignments.
“I was so scared at first to have to do such a big report, but in the end, I’m so glad we got to do it,” she said.
MacKenzie wrote about England and wore a dress styled after the garb worn during the Tudor reign.
“My mom made it and sewed it together. We looked up drawings of Tudor dresses and May dresses and royal dresses,” she said.
MacKenzie said she was shocked by some of what she learned when researching her report, particularly about King Henry VIII, who famously beheaded two of his six wives and broke away from the Catholic Church to form the Church of England.
Her classmate Shawn Fekety, who donned a Roman toga in honor of his Italian heritage, also said he learned some unusual things.
“Italy used to be the Roman empire, and Julius Caesar was an emperor. He used to eat and then throw it up,” he said.
Records do imply that vomiting was a regular and accepted part of dining in the upper classes in Rome, and the orator Cicero did mention that Julius Caesar “expressed a desire to vomit after dinner” in one of his writings.
In addition to interesting facts, Angelo said the nationality reports fulfill sixth-grade standards, such as how to conduct research and write a bibliography. Sixth-graders in Poland have been celebrating Nationality Day for at least 20 years.
“Hopefully, they also learn about other people and to appreciate all people from all backgrounds,” Angelo said.
Julia Zaksek researched Romania and said getting to know about her classmates’ heritage was “really interesting because you never really know or think about where people are from.”