Culturegrams: Excellent For Country and State/Province Reports

Have you ever been working on a country or state report and not had everything you needed to complete it or maybe just wanted a good place to start?  King County Library's database, Culturegrams, may be just the tool you need.  To reach it from any computer you begin by typing in www.kcls.org, then click on the link to "Databases" at the top left of the page.  Scroll to the Subject List and choose "Countries and States".  From there you can pick "Culturegrams".  If you're not at a King County Library you'll have to enter your card number at this point to get access to this database.

Once you've entered the database you'll find a wide range of options.  You can either link directly to the country information or you can also link to information on the 50 states and each of the 13 Canadian Provinces.  In addition there's a kid's version to make it easier for younger kids who are working on reports.

Not only will you find information under the typical categories of Land and Climate, Population, and History, etc., but Culturegrams also includes unique information on lifestyle, holidays, and daily life.  Other special features of Culturegrams are five recipes for each country, color flag images and flag outlines, sound files providing natonal anthems and country name pronunciation, and state bird sound files

For teachers there are also suggested activities and a list of national curriculum standards met by CultureGrams.  Students and teachers can create their own data tables and graphs to do comparisons between countries which may be a valueable teaching tool.  Be sure to take advantage of this online source that at one time you had to go into the library to use.