First of all, let me tell you that I am giving away as a freebie my PDF presentation about the Christmas and New year celebration in Bulgaria.
The presentation is in English, it’s for grade level 1-2, the size is around 3-4 MB

If you are interested, all you have to do is to subscribe to my site and send me an e-mail from “Contact us”. Make sure you include your e-mail address, otherwise I would not be able to send you the presentation.
So if your school is doing cultural days, this might be the perfect thing to save you some time.

“10 things you should remember if you want to survive Elementary school Cultural days“

1. Involve your child! He is the star, not you! Don’t overshadow him/her, let them participate and help you. I guarantee you they would love you for it!

2. Don’t be tempted to get into too much details. Kids love details…whenever they ask for them. Lead them to ask questions, don’t just dump the information on them.

3. Food. That’s the most important part. No matter what you talk about, no matter what you bring as a visual aid, if you don’t give them food, they are not going to be happy. That applies if your food stinks too. Oh, and always bring more than you think you’ll need.

4. Presents. This is one of the things that the kids are going to remember the most, they are going to bring them home and talk about them with their families. Don’t overdo it, it needs to be small and meaningful, not big and high priced.

5. Visual aid. The most boring thing for a kid is to sit through a boring and long, and boring and with no pictures, and boring and with no video, and boring presentation given by a grown up that is only happy to be out of there as soon as it’s over. Did I mention boring? So, consider pictures, video, music..something to “show”, rather than to tell.

6. “Show-Tell-Touch”. If you want to show your Grand-grand-grandma’s china at school, forget about it. The most important thing for the kids after seen what you talk about is to touch whatever can be touched. Bring things that they can touch and discuss later.

7. Ask questions! Ask the kids what they think, ask them what they know! You would be surprised of the things you are going to hear!

8. Changes. Prepare to make changes on the go, because most likely you’ll have to. Think of all the worse case scenarios that might happen ( like your laptop wouldn’t work or you can’t find something you brough to school , ask me about it, I know…) and prepare to have plan B, C, D, E F and pray you wont’ have to go down to Z.

9. Read the “Boring-meter”. If the kids don’t look at you, they most likely are not listening to you either/. If they become restless, just skip a part of the presentation and do something interacting. You might even have time to come back to the skiped part later. It’s not important to do the presentation ” the right way”, but to know that whatever you say actually is heard by the kids. If you lose their attention, you are wasting your time and theirs equally.

10. No matter how well you are prepared, just accept the inevitable truth that it never would be enough.
You might not have enough time, you might have too much time…but the fact of the matter is that you would always think that you could have done more or differently.

Good luck and remember that no matter what, your kids are going to love you for doing this! 🙂