Blue Mountain’s Debut Cultural Fair Takes Students Across the Globe

All day Thursday, May 8 at Blue Mountain Middle School, eighth graders welcomed visitors, stamped passports and answered questions. For some, the topic was Mexico. Others displayed what they had learned about China, Iraq, Ecuador or Cuba.

Blue Mountain’s inaugural Cultural Fair featured booths set up on three floors and required students to be tested by their peers. There were 25 different countries featured during the event.

“I thought it was overwhelmingly positive,” said eighth-grade teacher Amy Deegan, who helped plan and develop the Cultural Fair. “I felt like the students really enjoyed learning about the identity of other cultures.”

The project began when the entire eighth grade completed a survey last month. Each student listed the top four countries they wanted to research, and their teachers put them together in groups of three, four or five based on their wish lists.

The research and resulting poster boards that decorated the booths were completed in just over a week and were interdisciplinary in nature. The students in each group divided up areas of research and learned more about what made that country unique related to science, social students, math and ELA.

Sixth and seventh graders visited throughout the day. Each period, the booths received visits from five or six different groups of students.

The younger students received flag stickers for “visiting” that country, then listened to the eighth graders present what they learned throughout their research. The younger students also came with a sheet of questions to ask if those topics had not been covered in the presentation.

“They had to work together as a group and monitor one another, which was difficult,” Deegan said. “But it was a really good challenge for them.”