World Cup kicks off lessons, competition for Chelsea classrooms

A stroll through the Mary C. Burke Elementary Complex in Chelsea lately feels like taking a trip around the world.

Classroom doors in the four-school facility are decorated with a collage of drawings representing a country in this year’s FIFA World Cup. Waffles and chocolate for Belgium. Lederhosen and castles for Germany. Dunes and beaches for Morocco.

It’s all in celebration of the global sporting event, which gets underway this week. Excitement is high in Chelsea.

“I really want Spain to win but I would go for Mexico, too,” said Emily Rivera, a fourth grader at Hooks Elementary. The 10-year-old said she likes soccer because “you get to play versus other countries, and it’s a good sport.”

Chelsea Public Schools Superintendent Almi Abeyta said the World Cup is more exciting for most of her students than the Super Bowl.

"It’s something that all our families are tuning into because soccer is so big in their countries," she said. Nearly 90% of students in the district are Hispanic or Latino.

Chelsea will be hosting Fiesta Fútbol, a series of outdoor watch parties in Chelsea Square during the games.

And the school district is turning the World Cup into a learning opportunity.

Educators delegated a different World Cup country to each elementary classroom earlier this year.

“ That has energized them to become fans of Uruguay or fans of Ghana,” said Malik Howshan, the district’s officer of innovation, access and opportunity.

For the past several months, students have designed posters highlighting fun facts about their country, drawn maps and learned their country’s soccer chant as part of a schools-wide contest.

During a recent visit, students in classrooms representing Algeria, Canada and Australia impressed with chants and dancing, performing splits, kicks and leg balances as they repped their assigned country.

“This is something they don’t teach you in music teaching school,” said music teacher Richard Romanoff. He dug into research on YouTube to find the chants, including “One, two, three, viva l'Algérie!” which has the rare distinction of featuring three languages (English, Spanish, and French).

“I picked chants that the students would be able to do, you know, in second grade,” he said.

It’s not just chants they’re learning, but the foods, cultures, geography and wildlife of their country.

“I learned that there's a lot of cool animals, like the fennec fox and cheetahs and camels that you can ride on,” said second grader Zoe Hemphill, whose classroom studied Algeria.

Fourth grader Luciana Zapata said of Colombia, “ I'm learning that my country only speaks Spanish and there a lot of people in it and my country, it has parts that are so pretty.”

Students also wrote letters to professional players and learned soccer drills in gym class. Later this month, the district will host a soccer tournament across Chelsea’s four elementary schools, which serve nearly 2,000 students.

Though 48 countries total are competing in this year’s World Cup, district leaders picked 24 that were not too difficult to research — and which already had some recognition among the kids.

Asked who he’s rooting for, second grader Anthony Serrano, without missing a beat, replied “Portugal.”

“ Because I love Cristiano Ronaldo,” he said, referring to one of the sport's living legends.

In her fourth grade classroom, teacher Anita Caceda proudly displays flags of places her students are from, including Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. A student at his desk kept a version of the official World Cup competition ball under his feet.

“ You can't stop these kids from playing soccer,” Caceda said. “I  think it really brings a sense of community to them, and it makes them feel like really special.”

Chelsea partnered with Soccer Without Borders Massachusetts, an organization that runs camps and clinics for kids in underserved communities, to make learning around the World Cup fun. Bruno Contreras, its director, said the World Cup was a golden opportunity to build on the group’s mission of spreading empathy. The group has also partnered with other districts like Framingham and East Boston, also home to large immigrant student populations.

“We celebrate our backgrounds, our roots, our diversity, and we wanna express that to the kids, especially, like, the ones who have come to this country recently,” Contreras said.

Teacher Meg Hawthorne’s class studied Ecuador. She said the World Cup paired well with lessons on geography, a topic studied in fourth grade.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that seven World Cup matches will be taking place nearby in Foxborough.

“ For these kids, I think it's really exciting to know that they're just, you know, a hop, skip, and a jump away from Gillette, where it's all gonna be taking place, and it makes it feel that much more real to them,” she said.

The first game at Gillette, called “Boston Stadium” for the tournament, is Saturday between Haiti and Scotland. Other countries playing at the venue include Iraq, Norway, Scotland, Morocco, England, Ghana and France.