About the makers of One Globe Kids
The One Globe Kids team travels the world to visit real children and their families and spend multiple days recording their story. The first One Globe Kids stories were created in 2009 by Anne Glick to empower parents and educators to share the world with our children. The One Globe Kids education materials are made in by teachers with experience in global education, teaching in public and private schools, in the UK, the USA and the Netherlands.
Since 2016, One Globe Kids is a program of Globe Smart Kids, a non-profit social enterprise, determined to make the foreign feel familiar to kids worldwide. Meet the Globe Smart Kids team of experts and supporters here!
“The idea for One Globe Kids was born one afternoon while I read the children’s book Joyce’s Day to my 3-year-old son in our apartment in New York City. Printed in South Africa in 1974 and given to me as a newborn present by my Aunt Joan in 1975, its photos and simple text made Joyce’s day in South Africa relatable to me, a young, white girl living in small-town Illinois.
I am convinced that this early exposure to other people and places, however insignificant it seemed at the time, has helped to shape my view of the world and my engagement with it. From beginning foreign language study in middle school to studying and working abroad, my preparation for life in a globalized world can be traced back to the simple curiosity I had for Joyce and her family.
I went looking for more “Joyce-like” books for my son Sebastian and found several beautiful, but basic, books about children in other countries. I did not find the personal, intimate, rounded stories that would make these children more familiar than foreign for him. And thus began my journey to make the international story series that I want to share with my kids, Sebastian and his two brothers, Willem and Josef.
Even when foreign travel is unrealistic, and I can’t teach them the words and sounds of a new language, I have the power to help shape how they see our globe and how they interact with it.
I hope One Globe Kids empowers you to share the world with your children. And that in the future, all of our children are kinder, wiser, and happier because they know more about the globe we share.”
Anne K. Glick, creator of One Globe Kids
TEDx Anne Glick: “How a child’s imagination can fight prejudice”
When joining One Globe Kids you have the option to sign up for email news and be the first to hear about new content, new research, or fun updates. And please find us online and become a friend, fan, or follower.
• Join us on Facebook to receive the latest information on One Globe Kids and global education for the youngest global citizens.
• Follow us on Twitter to learn about what’s new in the world of Globe Smart Kids, making the foreign feel familiar to kids worldwide.
• Find us on Pinterest to see all the good stuff that we have found to bring the world into your classroom.
• We are also on Instagram with lots of photos from the stories.
• Watch videos on our YouTube channel.
One Globe Kids is a non-profit program by Globe Smart Kids. There are many ways to support our work. Donations big and small go towards new story production and improving the friendship experience, because the more kids like making new friends around the world, the more likely they are to do it again and closer to home. Donate here!
About One Globe Kids
Nope, One Globe Kids is a program for the youngest students. For many of them this is their first experience of meeting a peer outside their daily bubble. There is no actual contact between the user and the children in the stories, it is a simulated experience. For the teachers, there is no need to make arrangements with other classrooms, across time difference and languages. However, cross-cultural visual exchanges are great to do with your school’s students after working with One Globe Kids in lower grades.
We get that a lot :-). No, One Globe Kids is different. There is no actual contact between the user and the children in the stories. It is a simulated experience, which makes it entirely safe for both participating children and users. One Globe Kids is nearly a cultural exchange for the very youngest.
Oh yes! One Globe Kids has received 5 star reviews and multiple awards, like an Academics’ Choice Award for Smart Media and a 5 star Educational App Store Certificate. One Globe Kids was featured amongst others in Common Sense Media, Scholastic and the American School Library Journal as an important resource for building cultural literacy and raising global citizens. Check out our Youtube channel for some great video reviews, like the one by the App Fairy and WMTV15.
One Globe Kids is evidence based. The content is made in collaboration with academia and backed by 70 years of scientific research on intergroup contact theory, cross-group friendship and imagined contact, which positively influence attitudes and behaviors toward others.
The University of Kent in the UK uses One Globe Kids in a groundbreaking new study titled: “Virtual intergroup contact to create Global Citizens – Tackling prejudice in children using new digital media” and is currently testing the impact of One Globe Kids with 200+ primary school students. The first outcomes were published in November 2017: One Globe Kids in action: evaluating anti-prejudice projects.
You can also find One Globe Kids as a recommended global education resource for the very youngest in the Digital Play for Global Citizens publication by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.
One Globe Kids is a non-profit program. To reach as many children as we can, we try to keep our rates as low as we can. Please reach out if you need help finding funding to join!
There are multiple ways to explore the world with One Globe Kids. First decide which technology you like to use, iPad/ iPhone or computer/smart board.
In the Apple app store you will find two apps:
- Try for free: Download the free One Globe Kids app via the Apple App Store and visit Valdo in Haiti and Larasati in Indonesia for FREE. Visit more friends via $1.99 in-app purchase. You choose when and where you want to go. Once on your device, you can take them anywhere!
- All friends: Purchase the One Globe Kids – All Friends app to get all currently available AND future friends from all countries, including Education Toolkits, for only $9.99! Perfect for classrooms, homeschooling and to get all friends at once: Haiti, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Burundi, USA, Israel, and more coming soon.
To access all the materials via this website you have multiple options, depending on how many students you work with. Sign up with just your email and visit two friends at no cost during a two week free trial. Pay an annual fee to access the full program, including all stories, lessons and activities.
Find all the options here and get started: JOIN HERE.
One Globe kids was designed for young children, including those too young to read by themselves. It is fully narrated and includes simple icons so users can easily navigate the series without help. As we all know, children have vivid imaginations, often creating whole worlds around their pretend play. While they’re not really in the ballet or catching bad guys or racing cheetahs, imaginative play helps prepare them for real and active participation in the world.
Each One Globe Kids story is designed to stimulate the reader’s global imagination. It’s impossible for most of us to take our children around the world for them to make friends, to learn about other cultures and languages and new ways of doing thing. But One Globe Kids helps to do just that – it makes international friendships feel possible and paves the way for them to be real in the future.
We don’t know where our children will be in 20 years. But we do know that in our increasingly inter-connected, globalized world, the ability to interact with a diverse range of people is an amazing asset no matter who you are or where you live. One Globe Kids believes that the skills and confidence needed for global interaction can be encouraged from a very young age. We aim to do just that.
About the stories
About global friendship
Preparing students for diverse friendship is an essential part of helping children feel safe, happy and ready to engage within our rapidly changing world. When children feel comfortable approaching and befriending those outside of their familiar bubble, they gain self-confidence and life experiences that they would never otherwise have. They are better equipped to engage, to problem-solve, and to adapt to new situations.
For over 70 years, researchers have studied what makes people from different groups get along or not get along and One Globe Kids puts these findings to work in a global context.
By working with One Globe Kids, children gain:
-
- Global knowledge: Deepening their awareness of families, communities and cultures around the world, including their own, and explore what makes them similar and unique.
- Culturally-open attitudes: Developing a mind-set and attitudes that are open to differences and sees similarities as opportunities for positive connections.
- Contact skills: Building self-confidence and comfort interacting with peers in other groups through imagined contact and role-play.
- Prosocial behaviors: Practicing prosocial behaviors of sharing, working together, trusting, helping and empathy with those in their familiar bubble and beyond.
Teachers working with the One Globe Kids K-2 ELA curriculum will find definitions for Global Friendship goals per grade. We recommend visiting at least three friends in three different countries to see impact
In our increasingly diverse world, it is essential that children are prepared not only to manage diversity, but to engage with it (Cameron & Leman, 2015).
They must be equipped with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors that enable them to be informed, engaged and empathetic citizens (UNCESCO, 2014).
Children with friends outside their own social, ethnic, racial, economic, or religious bubbles develop important 21st century skills and abilities that those who stay in their own group/bubble won’t.
Prosocial behavior, global knowledge, culturally open attitudes and contact skills developed in early childhood will influence choices throughout their lifetime: whom to befriend, whom to help, whom to trust, whom to hire, whom to elect. In adulthood, amplified by economic and security concerns, biases can feed division, hatred and persistent inequality.
That is why One Globe Kids is designed as a virtual friendship experience – child users will feel that they have actually met, visited and befriended a peer elsewhere. This lays the foundation for a new generation of problem solvers: global citizens who feel safe, happy and excited about interacting with diverse people and in diverse contexts.
Read more on the Globe Smart Kids blog:
Diverse friendships are good for kids (and require confidence!) – Part 1/2
Diverse friends are good for kids (and require confidence!) – Part 2/2
One Globe Kids is designed as a friendship experience – child users will feel that they have actually met, visited and befriended a peer elsewhere. Preparing students for global friendship is an important and valuable part of helping them become active, empathetic citizens. By beginning at an early age, all students can develop the knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviors that will benefit them individually and collectively as members of a shared society. The Global Friendship Goals used in the One Globe Kids ELA curriculum are based on research in intergroup contact theory and have been specifically crafted to foster intercultural competence and encourage diverse friendship. You will find the goals for each grade in the ELA Teacher guides and one the Education page.
About One Globe Kids technology
There are multiple ways to explore the world with One Globe Kids. The stories and online friendship activities are available for the iPad, iPhone, and computer. The free ELA materials can only be accessed by joining here on the website.
Explore the world by app
- One Globe Kids – free app with IAPs: Download the free One Globe Kids app via the Apple App Store and visit Valdo in Haiti and Larasati in Indonesia for FREE. Visit more friends via a $1.99 in-app purchase.
- One Globe Kids – All Friends app: Purchase the All Friends app to get all currently available AND future friends from all countries for only $9.99! Perfect for classrooms, homeschooling and getting all friends at once.
Explore the world on your computer and/or smart-board/projector
- Online Friends are available wherever you access the internet. They are also the ideal way to share the materials in a classroom or with groups of children via a smartboard or projector. Joining One Globe Kids is easy. Sign up with just your email and visit two friends for free to try OR get access to the full program starting from $39 per year.
While we firmly believe in the power of learning more about each other and sharing across all borders, One Globe Kids also believes it must be done in a way that is safe for children. Protecting children’s privacy online is the responsibility of all of us. This is one reason that One Globe Kids is not a social media platform and does enable actual contact between users.
We don’t include any advertising, analytics tracking, or location tracking in our apps and online friends platform. One Globe Kids stories and activities are not linked to outside websites or social media software. Please see our privacy policy for more details on how we help keep children safe online.
One Globe Kids apps and online friends are certified by the kidSAFE® Seal Program. The kidSAFE® Seal Program is an independent certification service and seal program that reviews and certifies the safety practices of children-friendly websites and applications, including kid-targeted game sites, virtual worlds, social networks, PC and mobile apps, web-connected devices, and other similar online and interactive products. Go to www.kidsafeseal.com for more information.
Interactivity means you can engage with something. The One Globe Kid series is designed to encourage children to engage as much as possible with each new international friend, given the language, distance and age constraints that exist. It is not a social media platform, but a story platform.
Here are a few examples of how children can interact with their One Globe Kids friends:
- In the “Adventure” version of a new friend’s story, she asks you to choose what you want to do next, just as friends decide together what games they want to play or when it’s time for a snack. For example, Luna in New York City asks, “Do you want a tour of my room or should we have breakfast right away?” You choose!
- In “Counting” and “Speak with me” each friend invites you to learn their language by listening, repeating and even recording yourself speaking in Kirundi, Dutch, Bahasa Indonesia and all of the other languages in the series.
- In “Tell me about yourself” your new friend wants to learn about your life, just as you have learned about her life. She asks you specific questions that encourage you to draw parallels between yourselves, such as “I ride my bike to school. How do you get to school?” On the iPhone and the iPad you can record your answers and then listen to your conversation.
- You can put yourself and your friends/family on the globe, helping to visualize where you live in relationship to your new friends around the world.
- You can include your own photo or choose an icon in the series – when you’re counting in Kréyol with Valdo or explaining how you get to school, you see yourself in the series with your new friends.
For educators
Young children see color, hear about race, and observe how grown-ups struggle to explain what the news in the United States. If we do not start the conversation early, children will make up their own stories.
Anti-racism education with young kids doesn’t need to be complicated. If you keep it to something as simple as knowing more than a ‘single story’, you help eliminate biases from the beginning naturally. Learning more stories feeds a child’s curiosity, empathy, and openness to others.
We believe that anti-racism should be part of everything you do at school, every day. As part of the Teachers Pay Teachers Social Justice project, educator Phoebe Mihael developed lessons to use One Globe Kids to get started: Stories for Change: K-2 anti-racism unit with One Globe Kids. The more stories you know, the more friends you can make!
Preparing students for diverse friendship is an essential part of helping children feel safe, happy and ready to engage within our rapidly changing world. When children feel comfortable approaching and befriending those outside of their familiar bubble, they gain self-confidence and life experiences that they would never otherwise have. They are better equipped to engage, to problem-solve, and to adapt to new situations.
For over 70 years, researchers have studied what makes people from different groups get along or not get along and One Globe Kids puts these findings to work in a global context.
By working with One Globe Kids, children gain:
-
- Global knowledge: Deepening their awareness of families, communities and cultures around the world, including their own, and explore what makes them similar and unique.
- Culturally-open attitudes: Developing a mind-set and attitudes that are open to differences and sees similarities as opportunities for positive connections.
- Contact skills: Building self-confidence and comfort interacting with peers in other groups through imagined contact and role-play.
- Prosocial behaviors: Practicing prosocial behaviors of sharing, working together, trusting, helping and empathy with those in their familiar bubble and beyond.
Teachers working with the One Globe Kids K-2 ELA curriculum will find definitions for Global Friendship goals per grade. We recommend visiting at least three friends in three different countries to see impact
Nope, One Globe Kids is a program for the youngest students. For many of them this is their first experience of meeting a peer outside their daily bubble. There is no actual contact between the user and the children in the stories, it is a simulated experience. For the teachers, there is no need to make arrangements with other classrooms, across time difference and languages. However, cross-cultural visual exchanges are great to do with your school’s students after working with One Globe Kids in lower grades.
One Globe Kids is currently aligned with Dutch, UK and USA standards:
Nederlandse Onderwijsdoelstellingen
Alignment One Globe Kids ELA curriculum K
One Globe Kids is evidence based. The content is made in collaboration with academia and backed by 70 years of scientific research on intergroup contact theory, cross-group friendship and imagined contact, which positively influence attitudes and behaviors toward others.
The University of Kent in the UK uses One Globe Kids in a groundbreaking new study titled: “Virtual intergroup contact to create Global Citizens – Tackling prejudice in children using new digital media” and is currently testing the impact of One Globe Kids with 200+ primary school students. The first outcomes were published in November 2017: One Globe Kids in action: evaluating anti-prejudice projects.
You can also find One Globe Kids as a recommended global education resource for the very youngest in the Digital Play for Global Citizens publication by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.
The K-2 One Globe Kids ELA curriculum is a free modular way to explore the world with your classroom. Made by and for teachers, all lessons are aligned with Common Core Standards and include activities for reading comprehension, writing, language and speaking and listening. A Teacher Guide explain it all and 11 lessons can be used with one or with multiple stories, for 3 weeks or up to 36 weeks. Find the entire ELA curriculum HERE.
And with all the extra available extension activities it is possible to integrate One Globe Kids in more than just ELA!
We have found that children independently return to the stories and interactive features of the series when given “iPad time,” so using it alone or with a parent or caregiver at home is encouraged. Don’t necessarily expect students to bring up what they’ve seen or heard in the very short term. It can take time for this information and this experience to settle. Rest assured, it’s not forgotten and will be brought up again, sometimes when you least expect it.
One Globe Kids can serve as an entry point to discussing many different topics, from basics (such as morning routines around the world) to more complicated topics (such why it takes so long for one child to get to school or how life would be different without electricity). One of the most unique things about this series is how it makes these types of topics approachable while imparting a positive, open, and non-judgmental view of our world. Our discussion themes and listening and speaking questions can be of assistance, find them here.
We recommend visiting a minimum of 3 friends to see an impact on students global knowledge, culturally open attitudes, contacts skills and pro-social behavior. Visiting multiple peers in multiple countries enhances the ability to discuss what children have seen and learned. You can then reinforce the global benefits of the series by drawing simple connections between their lives and the lives of your students.
If you teach students in the USA in Kindergarten, first grade or second grade, the One Globe Kids ELA curriculum will do just that. A teacher guide explains how the modular curriculum works, how it aligns with CCS and how it educates global citizens during reading comprehension, writing, listening and speaking and language lessons.
Although One Globe Kids was not specifically designed to teach ELL, we know some parents and educators do use it for learning English. We would love to add an ELL curriculum to the program in the future!
Oh yes! You can explore the globe along with your students and learn together. The FREE One Globe Kids ELA curriculum for K-2 makes it easy to do so, while covering Common Core standards for reading comprehension, language, listening and speaking and writing at the same time.
For families
Sure! If you plan to visit one of the countries featured in One Globe Kids, exploring it before you go will give your child a sense of familiarity that will help with exploring while you are there. Your child will already know things like the local weather, typical foods and what the country might look like. To learn some facts about the country, don’t forget to do the ‘Country Facts’ activity. And of course, learning a little bit of the local language with the ‘Speak and Count with me’ activities, will help with making new friends!
Awesome! After exploring the world with One Globe Kids at school, your child can visit more friends, or the same friends again, at his/her own pace. Since One Globe Kids is created for very young children, little brothers and sisters can join the fun too. We recommend downloading the app for your iPad or iPhone, but feel free to join the the education subscription and get everything the teacher has at school.