During two days 10 children from foster families made a virtual journey to the United States so as to find out more about the country, its history, geography and traditions in the American center in Volgograd. This journey was a part of events planned for the Alumni grant Future Leaders for Diplomatic Relations and International Friendship. The main objective of this project was to break the stereotypes of America imposed by movies, books and Internet, i.e. stereotypes of the no-problem and materialistic country, and show the importance of diplomatic relations. 10 kids aged 10-13 from foster families were selected to take part in the two days journey. Tatiana Zagumennova, CC alumni 2007 and member of the NGO “UNESCO Club of Child Dignity”, selects the children from three district Mutual Aid Clubs that work with foster families and helps us a lot during our two-day seminar.

We started our “classes” with offering kids to draw a picture that would represent America for them. It can be anything, from sights to people. Supposedly, this is something very famous and / or stereotypical. Each child presented their work and we hang them up for future reference and comparison on Day 2.

The learning component of this day included a POWER POINT presentation with the general tips about America, selecting the facts that are not widely-known. The topics included symbols of the United States, main historical monuments, prominent facts about famous people, diplomatic relations, cars, media, business etc

After that six FLEX alumni presented selected states (New York, California, Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington) – the states where they spent time while on exchange program. Presentation included costumes, interesting facts and general information about the differences in life from the home town. After those presentations children were offered to conduct their own research of the states not yet mentioned by the alumni using the resources at the American Corner (books, attributes, Internet etc.) and made their own presentations to fellow students and alumni.


Day 2 of the seminar was marked by lots of even more entertaining events. We started with children drawing America again – remembering what they had learned during Day 1. After that in plenum we compared both drawings (Day 1 and Day 2) and children explained how their perspective had changed, what they did not consider to be totally true or vice versa and why.
During the second part of the day kids were busy creating letters to send to their pen-pall friends from our sister-city Cleveland (Ohio, USA)! In the letters they wrote about their hobbies and beloved pets and told interesting facts about the city they live in – Volgograd to their friends on the other side of the ocean. We are going to send these letters to the President of Greater Cleveland-Volgograd Oblast Alliance and will be looking forward to receive a feedback from him

We received a thankful letter from NGO “UNESCO Club of Child Dignity”, lots of kind words and high evaluation of our work from children’s . But probably it is the words of the children themselves that resonated the most...As many of them wrote “You are really super! We have leaned a lot of interesting facts about the US. We like the atmosphere in your Center. It is always warm friendly and exciting!


As a present the kids received books about America in English and also each of them – a Certificate about successful completion of this two-days seminar.


The end of the project as planned was visiting American food industry business in Volgograd – McDonald’s– to let kids have tasty fun!