Kids around the Kansas City area are gearing up for a summer break like no other thanks to the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament coming to town next month.
And one local teacher is making sure her students know exactly what they can expect from the big event. Nancy Smith, a first grade teacher at Heatherstone Elementary in Olathe, created a whole curriculum around the World Cup to finish out the last two weeks of school.
Students started off their lessons by learning about the history of the World Cup and the different cultures that make up the tournament.
“They play from all over the world. We get to watch it on TV. People dress up crazy at these games. They love their teams,” Smith said while reading a World Cup book to students. “You will see people that will dress in the colors that they're wearing, kind of like what we do for the Super Bowl.”
There are a record 48 countries participating in this year’s World Cup, but Smith’s class focused on the eight with ties to Kansas City this summer.
Teams from Argentina, Algeria, Austria, Ecuador, Curaçao, Tunisia and the Netherlands are playing in the six matches located in Kansas City. Argentina, the Netherlands, Algeria and England have also made their base camps in the metro.
“We're going to become experts on these eight countries while they're here,” Smith said. “So hopefully when they go on to second grade and other grades, when they see these teams play on TV, they can have a connection with those teams.”
When Smith joined the group of thousands of volunteers with FIFA to help with the games and fan events, she saw an opportunity to take what she was learning there back to the classroom.
There are also many soccer fans in her class who wear jerseys to school and talk about their own games, but didn’t know how the World Cup worked or what it really was. With the rest of the year’s lessons and testing finished, she said creating a World Cup curriculum fell into place.
“I love to make learning meaningful for my kids, and if they're hearing about the World Cup in the news, well, then let's bring it down, so that it has something to do with them,” Smith said.
Smith said students’ World Cup studies will incorporate an array of subjects including health, math, science and social studies.
She also has a special interest in teaching about agriculture, so students are learning how crops play a role in the games, from the cowhide used to make the soccer balls to the cotton used as fabric for teams’ jerseys.
During their World Cup lessons, students split open soccer balls and shin guards to learn what materials the equipment is made of. Later, they engineered more shin guards for stuffed animals and then their own classmates.
Smith’s daughter-in-law, who played soccer for the University of Kansas, visited the class to talk about her experience with the sport. Students also had a day to wear their own soccer jerseys and bring in any medals they have won.
Sophia Lewis, a first grader, already had a good idea of what the World Cup is ahead of Smith’s lessons. At 7 years old, she’s already been playing soccer for more than half her life.
“It's the biggest soccer thing in the whole world,” she said of the tournament.
Instead of writing a report, students in Smith’s class made their own “jerseys” collaged with information about their assigned country. Students drew their country’s national flower, crop, flag and team’s jersey — while also trying a regional bag of chips.
Students also have their own ideas on why countries were interested in making Kansas City their home this summer. Some said the town's food, hotels and soccer supplies and facilities may have been an appeal.
“Our country's cool and it's big, it's super big, and they can go all around it,” first grader Gage Cox said.
Many students are fans of soccer superstar Lionel Messi — and Argentina’s team by extension. One student even wore his Messi-branded socks to mark the start of the World Cup lessons.
The group of fans includes first grader Lenny Nash, who said he’s been a fan of Messi’s since at least before May.
“He breaks records all over the world,” Lenny said.
Other students learned new facts about their country, including that Ecuador exports bananas and England is located in the United Kingdom. “I know in the Netherlands, they have a festival with cheese, lots and lots and lots of cheese,” Lenny said.
First grader Dylan Ndungu said he’ll be rooting for South Africa in the games since Kenya, the country he was born in, won’t be playing in the tournament. He said the World Cup coming to Kansas City means it will be “a fun time.”
“I'm going to ask my dad if I could go,” Dylan said. “Because he knows I like soccer, but I like football a little bit more.”
Finding available and affordable tickets may be a challenge for students’ families. But regardless of whether they make it to a match, Smith said she hopes the students take away an important lesson to make the connections between what's the same and different between cultures, and learn to celebrate both.
“Not everybody gets to travel the world, so I want to find a way to bring the world into my children and into my students,” Smith said.
