Micronations: Invent Your Own Country and Culture with 25 Projects

Build it Yourself

by Kathy Ceceri, Kathy Ceceri

For anyone who's ever dreamed of ruling over their own empire, here's your chance! Micronations are imaginary countries that have a lot of the same things as real ones: laws, customs, history, and their own flags, coins, and postage stamps. Micronations: Invent Your Own Country and Culture takes readers step-by-step to create their own unique realm, using examples from real nations, micronations, and fictional lands. What makes a country a country? What symbols and systems define a country and help it function? Learn about geography and government, technology and the environment, art and culture, and the literary device of "world-building" used in works like The Hobbit and Harry Potter.

Kids get to invent their own language, music, games, clothing, food, and holidays to fit their micronation's tradition. Whether they create a land of time travel where every city exists in a different epoch or an underwater monarchy whose chief export is fish, Micronations: Invent Your Own Country and Culture will engage kids' imagination and teach make-believe rulers how the real world works.

This title meets Common Core State Standards for literacy in language arts, history and social studies; Guided Reading Levels and Lexile measurements indicate grade level and text complexity.

Genres: Childrens, History

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2014

About the author

Kathy Ceceri is the author of STEAM books for kids and families including "Making Simple Robots," "Musical Inventions," and "Paper Inventions" from the publishers of Make magazine, and "BOTS" and "Video Games: Design and Code Your Own Adventure" from Nomad Press. Online, she was the Homeschooling Expert for Thoughtco, a founding editor of GeekMom.com, and a top writer for Wired's GeekDad blog. When she's not busy writing, Kathy presents hands-on workshops for students and educators.

Reviews

[Lorie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guidebook to creating your own country does a good job of helping students work through all the steps they need to think about when making up their new country; from the style of government, its geography, economy, and cultural identity. It would be of more interest to a class that was assigned this project than it would be to a casual reader. It could almost be used as text book for a unit on countries.

The book contains a table of contents, comprehensive glossary and index. It also has book and website resources for more information on the topic.

I would recommend this book for purchase by school or public libraries for students in grades 5-9.

This book was provided by the publisher for review by SWON Libraries.

[Hemet Neter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have loved this as a child (actually, I love the idea now). Good applied civics lessons...and, yes, your kids can learn how to make money that's hard to counterfeit, too! LoL!