Learning about the United Nations

As part of our study of Canadian History, we learned about the formation of the United Nations in 1945. We remembered learning about the League of Nations a few weeks ago, especially when we watched Paris 1919. I wanted to pause our study of Canadian History and take a few days to cover the United Nations, what it is and their role in the world. This topic crosses over to world geography and world news. I found a few resources that I wanted to share with you. These were very helpful to me to introduce this topic to my two older children (12 and 13).


We visited the United Nations website for kids and educators called United Nations Cyberschoolbus. This website is filled with information, lesson plans, games, quizzes, and more. We haven't explored the whole website yet. Some of the links didn't work for us, but that might be a problem from our end.

Here are a few links that we found helpful:

The Food Force is a video game on world hunger. It has six different missions and is geared to 8-13 year olds. The objective is to teach children about the logistical challenges of delivering food aid in a major humanitarian crisis. Here are some screen shots:

The Water Quiz where we learned interesting facts about water.

The UN Intro to learn about the history of the United Nations.

The Millenium Development Goals link explains the eight goals that all 192 United Nations member states have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. Some of the goals are achieving primary education for all, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, and promoting gender equality.


Nadene at Practical Pages has a notebook page and a lapbook mini book free to download. We used the notebook page to write a short summary about what we learned.

While learning about the Millenium Development Goals, I was reminded of the young Canadian that started Free the Children. We spent some time reading about how he got started and the amazing work he has accomplished around the world. I think it is important for our children to see that anyone can make a difference.

Your local library will probably have several books on this subject. I was able to find one that related directly to Canada. The book "Canada and the United Nations" is written by Bev Cline.

The other book on the photo is by National Geographic, "Every Human Has Rights". It is "a photographic declaration for kids based on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human rights with poetry from the ePals community". Thirty basic human rights are written and accompanied by a photo that illustrate each of them, along with a poem. You can read more about how this book came together here.