Full of creative ideas for enriching the primary curriculum through international projects? Mark Hinton recommends some resources that have worked wonders for his school

Objects, clothing, fabrics and food

Food is always a very popular addition to any lesson! We recently used bananas as a Geography topic, looking at fair trade, food miles, climate, travel and trade routes, and working conditions around the world. The children were fascinated and had never thought about where their bananas came from before! We covered Citizenship, Geography, Maths and ICT, using the internet to find out more about fair trade and the distance and routes to the Caribbean – we even e-mailed our MP to encourage fair trade!

Fabrics and clothing are also useful introductions to lessons. We have bought different outfits and fabrics from Indian shops in our area and the children are mesmerised every time we use them. Once the children are enthused, it is easy to start talking about why the clothing needs to help people stay cool, for example, or why ladies need to cover their heads. Using clothing as a starting point, we have taught schemes of work embracing RE, Art, Design Technology, Dance, Citizenship, Geography and History. We also used the costumes for a dance project as part of our DCSF International School Award submission.

Websites to support international work

There are many useful websites containing a variety of ready-made resources. A favourite website is the CAFOD resources site www.cafod.org.uk/ primary, which portrays a positive image of developing countries and encourages the children to think deeply about how they are part of a global community.

The Fairtrade Foundation also has an excellent website www.fairtrade.org.uk/ schools. We have used its many excellent resources to help our pupils learn about fair trade and ethical purchasing, and as a starting point for a major Geography project on fair trade. Again, we bought lots of fair trade products so the children could see, taste and handle them. The project covered History, Geography, Maths, English, Citizenship and Design Technology.

Both websites are most useful for providing teaching resources that can be quickly adapted.

Resources in the local community

In our school we are privileged to welcome children and families from a vast range of ethnic backgrounds and this makes accessing resources about other countries quite easy. It also provides us with a wonderful opportunity to embed community cohesion and get the whole ‘school family’ working together.

If your school isn’t ethnically mixed it can be difficult to do this, but there are a number of books that can help. Our favourites include a collection published by Franklin Watts www.franklinwatts.co.uk called Moving to Britain From… Titles include Afghanistan, Iraq, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Somalia, Turkey and Ukraine. Local communities can be a great starting point for learning, as many minority ethnic and immigrant families are happy to come into school and talk about their culture, country and customs.

Our pupils engaged with this passionately because they were learning about the heritage of their friends in class, but even if your school isn’t as ethnically mixed as ours, the books are interesting and useful additions to your international dimension lessons. In addition, we used projects like this to support our (successful) application for the DCSF International School Award!

Mark Hinton is Joint Headteacher and International Co-ordinator at St Francis Xavier Catholic Primary School, Oldbury