What parents of our students love about The Pillars Christian Learning Center is our summer programs. Making it easy for parents to keep their work schedule and keep the early learning going for kids throughout the summer months. During the month of July, we want to focus on learning to love everyone in the world, regardless of where they live or what they look like. Learning about other cultures around the world, in the states, and within our own community, we can appreciate each other’s differences and see the beauty in everyone. To start the learning off, here are some interesting cultural facts from around the world.
- There are a few languages that the majority of people speak across the globe. The top five languages spoken by the number of native speakers are Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic. If that’s not a surprise, there are over 6,000 total languages spoken in the world. Many of these languages are only spoken by a few hundred people and 800 to 1500 of them are found in Africa.
- If your kids find it gross when adults kiss when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, they might think the Mexican New Year’s tradition is more tasty. In many Hispanic countries, the ritual is to eat 12 grapes in the final minute of the year. If the grapes are eaten, you will have 12 wishes come true and the following year will bring you good luck.
Even though our students are too young to enjoy the adult version of this drink, do you know who invented the piña colada? The small caribbean island of Puerto Rico was the first country to slurp down this delicious coconut drink. Even though we don’t have a beach in San Antonio, our child care students can use their imagination and pretend we’re on the beach drinking this pineapple, coconut cream, and condensed milk drink. - Cities are always fascinating in other countries. In Dubai, the tallest building in the world can be found. Burj Khalifa towers above the city at 2,717 feet. In comparison, the tallest building in San Antonio is the Marriott Rivercenter, which is a meager 546 feet.
- San Antonio does have the Gulf of Mexico near by and a few lakes here and there, but even the state of Texas isn’t close to the country with the most lakes. Canada takes that prize with over three million lakes. 9 percent of the Canadian territory is freshwater and 60 percent of the lakes in the world are within it’s borders. Even Minnesota, nicknamed the land of 10,000 lakes, has a ways to go.
- And our most fun fact of the day: The Falkland Islands in the UK has the most sheep per capita. The population is about 3,000 people, but sheep greatly outnumber them with around half a million sheep.
Summer learning is fun, right? Keep it going at our learning and day care center, The Pillars Christian Learning Center. Our combined focus of early childhood development with a traditional education, we want each of our students to fall in love with learning about cultures throughout the world. It’s amazing what we can learn when we look to those around us.