We opened "Proud to be Romanian" week with hands-on activities, at after school and in the courses.
A themed week has the advantage of gathering under one title things that would otherwise stay scattered: a story, a song, a drawn pattern, a custom explained in passing. Put together over five days, they start to resemble one another and to mean something.
And the question we started from is the simplest imaginable and, at the same time, the hardest for an eight-year-old to answer: what the place you come from means. The answer does not come from a definition but from the things you recognise without anyone explaining them to you, from a song you know from your grandparents to a pattern on an embroidered blouse.
Good luck with the work.