Children are locked into their own worlds, they need to be encouraged to consider others’ point of view. They will only really appreciate another geographical area from visiting on holiday.

They expect all children to have the same house, food, school, transport, play facilities, the list goes on.

There are a number of ways in which teachers help children to explore “life elsewhere”.

As a child I remember having a penpal – I wrote to her reasonably regularly. I seem to remember being encouraged to do this by my teacher and she would sometimes give us ideas of what we could write about.

As a teacher I emulated this idea by sending emails to Australia, US and France with my 7 year olds. We had a lovely time answering questions and thinking up ones to ask…. It was always fascinating to me that children would read, engage and be motivated by just gently switching the emphasis. Ie instead of writing a story, write me a few questions that you would like the answers to…. Must be something to do with the fact that they felt they were writing for a purpose – easy really!!

So about a year ago, I thought maybe it would be good to have a way in which we could get children sharing flipcharts. We set up an area within the resource area where children, by their teachers could upload flipcharts – this was also a way of children sharing their activities in school with parents/carers.

Taking it a step further, was suggesting that teachers might like to use the flipchart format as a vehicle for sharing ideas, experiences and information across the globe….. and the teachers in forum picked up on the idea.

We now have a really exciting project starting where teachers from all over the world are going to use a character called Flippy (Flippette for the female version) as the communicator between flipchart pages between schools …. A downloadable resource pack or flipchart which hosts the assets allows everybody access, the only boundary being peoples’ imagination. To find the Flippy and Flippette Resource Pack, click here.

Go and read the excitement and enthusiasm with which this is being engaged…. Here