Students explore foreign cultures at World’s Fair

By Jeff Harrison
Midwest City Beacon

Carl Albert High School recently celebrated 35 years of its World’s Fair.

Students transform the school gymnasium into a global market with booths, food and artifacts from more than 60 different countries.

“We didn’t quite have as many booths as in the past, but we had really good quality this year,” said Luke Mosher, a teacher at Carl Albert. “Kids put a lot of effort into it.”

All sophomore students participated in the event through their world history class. Groups of three to five students worked on the projects together. They had a drawing to select the countries. The project included an essay, Google slides, commercial, hand-drawn map, marketing brochure/poster, artifacts, flag, and costume.

Students worked on their projects both during class time and after school.

They presented their projects to fellow students, teachers and administrators on Dec. 16. A team of teachers and administrators judged the projects and awarded cash prizes.

The Netherlands team of Cadence Vasquez, Katie Howard and Olive McGuire took first place. Second place went to Egypt’s Bryce Tucker, Aubrey Wilson, Lily Dickson, and Michael Burley. Finishing third was the Sri Lanka group of Gabrielle Whitefield, Emma Charlow, and Lauren Abhayagoonawardhana. And fourth place went to the Bahamas’ team of Lea Lan, Reese Prosper, Madison

Ethridge, and Fiona Higginbotham.

“This might’ve been the closest judging we’ve had,” Mosher said. “Netherlands and Egypt were excellent. The Egypt group made everything by hand, and they blew me away. The Netherlands had really good outfits and some really neat artifacts.”

The World’s Fair was started by former teachers Sylvia Kirk, Tex Rollins and Malcolm Wade.