One of the main objectives of this project was to make children living in the United States learn and reflect about culture in Brazil and vice versa. A second objective was to integrate contents and objectives of their curriculum into our project. Since reading and writing skills are crucial during our student’s age, we decided it would be beneficial to put these them in use. We also made sure to use other parts of their classroom curriculum.

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It all started during August. As a part of our exchange program, (Changing Perspectives, see appendix for details), we had to come up with a project to develop at public schools during the four months we would be spending abroad. Because all of us were mainly interested in helping with younger grades, we thought it would be beneficial to work together.

Our first step was mainly individual. We all attended our classes mainly to observe, have a better undesrtanding of how things functioned inside the classroom, and get to know our teachers better. Afterwards, we thought about the idea of exchanging letters. We came up with the objectives and figured out a way to work together. After much discussion, we all got started in our classrooms.

We decided that what we would do first was to write an introductory letter to our partner classrooms. The way we matched out the classrooms was like this:

Virginia´s classroom would trade letters with one of Maria Angela´s classroom in Logan.

 Ana Laura´s classroom would trade letters with Maria Angela´s classroom in Richmond.

Ana Laura´s classroom in Fortaleza would also trade letters with Amy´s classroom in Bauru.

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During this first letter the students presented themselves (name, age, city) and also sent some maps with their states and countries colored and labeled. Not only did they practice their writing skills, but we also used Social Studies lessons. We realized that it was difficult for the students to understand the concept of a place (a city, a state). Therefore, we planned an activity to explain ourselves better. We introduced the idea of a city, a state, a country, a continent, the world, and the universe. We did this by using different-sized boxes. We explained that there was a city inside of a state, and a state inside of a country. We emphasized that using a box was just a way for us to explain it in a simpler way, and that a box did not truly represent the composition of a city.

We all sent our first letter to our partner classrooms through the mail. The time it took to receive this letters varied, depending on the city. From Fortaleza to Logan and Richmond it did not take longer than two weeks. We did experience trouble with the letters from arriving in Fortaleza. Actually, Virginia and Ana Laura never received Letter 1 from Maria´s classrooms, and had to go to Plan B, which consisted of printing the letters since we all had scanned the letters before sending them.

Once the first partner classroom received Letter 1 (in this case, Amy and Maria) they made sure to pair up their students with one student from their partner classroom. We kept these up with these pairs during the rest of the time.

The students in Brasil wrote in Portuguese and the students in the United States wrote in English. When Virginia and Ana Laura delivered the letters to their classroom they read them in English (the original language), but made sure to translate for them into Portuguese. Maria did the same thing in Utah.

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The second letter that the students wrote included what they like to do with their families and what values were important to them. We decided to do this to compare and contrast those concepts valued in different cities. We suggested many of the values and talked with the students, asking them to come up with additional ones.

Further into the project, we showed our classrooms PowerPoint presentations of their partner classrooms and partner cities. The purpose of showing these presentations was for the students to be able to picture the group of students and the city they were connected to. These Powerpoint presentations consisted of classroom pictures, as well as individual pictures of students and of different places around their city. While we presented them, we made sure to ask our students if they thought their partner classroom was different from what they saw in their own classroom, if it seemed that they spoke the same language, if they had similar physical appearance, if their school was bigger, if their school was different, and finally, if their city had any resemblance of their own.

As a closure activity, children wrote a good bye letter, which, instead of being mailed like the rest of the letters, was scanned and e-mailed to the partner classroom. The reason of this is the limited time we have had for this project and the fact that the mail (especially from Brasil to the US) took a lot of time.