CultureGrams is one of those resources that is great for that 7th grade geography project. It has all the information about a country, state or province that you might find on the first page of an entry in the World Book. But it also has so much more! You don't have to be in middle school to explore (and enjoy!) the wonders of CultureGrams.
Any person who enters CultureGrams via the library website will arrive at a landing page offering four options: World, Kids, States, and Provinces versions. From there, you can select a route and lose yourself for hours.
Through the Kids portal, you can get all the same stuff as the regular World portal, but with simpler language and fewer breakdowns of information. You still see the same pictures and a lot of the same facts, but some things might have been left out if they seemed too advanced.
The World Edition of CultureGrams opens up with a map. From there, you can select a continent and then a country. This is the first step to it being a Browsable Resource: You can really just click anywhere and it will give you something to read.
Once you're in, you get everything from an infographic of the Average Person in that country, but all the Book Report info (national flag, national anthem, and even national potato chip if they have one!). You can keep digging into the information about food, holidays, conflicts, weather, and even where the country stands on the United Nations' Gender Inequality Index, opens a new window. Want culturally-specific recipes? You got it!
The State and Province Editions read a little more like the Kids Edition, but that is primarily due to the smaller amount of information needed on the landing page. You'll still get all the big numbers, but your facts rundown probably won't be as long as it would for a country. You still get those recipes, though.
So have at it, do some clicking, and you never know what you'll learn!
