FARGO (AP) - To his classmates, Barkadle Omar looks like any other class-going, pizza-eating, homework-hating sixth-grader.

But one snowy November morning, Patrick Lin and Connor Linnerooth realized their assumptions were off just a little bit.

"What is the white stuff?" Omar asked, pointing out the window. A recent immigrant from Somalia via a refugee camp in Kenya, he had never seen snow.

Lin and Linnerooth did what any self-respecting sixth-graders would do. They took him outside and introduced him to the heavy, wet cold. They could relate, though, when Omar declared he didn't like it.

"Not too many people like winter," Lin said.

While many of the sixth-graders at Fargo's Agassiz Middle School share the same ZIP codes, the stories of how they got here vary.

Within the next couple of months, one of the student's stories will represent the region as part of an international project on how cultures and languages spread across the globe.

"Everybody has a migration story," said teacher Julie Costello. "We just need to find them."

Costello initiated the lesson after she took part in a national seminar on human migration.

The Genographic Project, a partnership between the National Geographic Society and IBM, uses DNA analysis to map how the Earth was populated.

Costello had her DNA analyzed and learned her oldest ancestors started in Africa, moved north through today's Iran and then headed to Germany.

She wanted her students to understand how people continue to migrate, and decided the students' classmates might be the best teachers.

Members of Costello's classes spent a recent morning interviewing and getting to know the students who are learning English as a second or even third language.

Janelle Wanzek and Houda Abdelrahman interviewed Atter Mongdel. The sixth-grader came to Fargo two years ago via Tennessee from the Sudan. War pushed the family out of Africa, but his mother made the decision to leave Tennessee.

"She heard from a friend that Fargo was a good place," he said.

Although Mongdel has grown fond of pizza, Chinese food, football and roller-skating, he misses some of his favorite African foods and the apartment building where he used to live.

Siennah Christianson interviewed Sara Malwal, who moved to Fargo about two years ago from the Sudan. Malwal didn't want to share why she came to Fargo, but Christianson was impressed nonetheless.

"She speaks very fluent English, which I would think would be impossible because I was in French class for a whole year and still I can't get the hang of it," she wrote in her story. "I just can't see how she does it!"

And so the stories continue:

Sarisa Smith lived in Japan until she was 4 years old. Her family lived in San Diego before moving to Fargo to be closer to her grandfather, she said.

Lisa Nguyen moved to Fargo from Vietnam less than a year ago. She came with her grandmother and misses hot days in Saigon.

Within the next few weeks, Costello's classes will choose one student's story to post on the National Geographic Web site as part of its human migration project. That story will represent ZIP code 58103, home to Agassiz school. But the lessons will go much deeper.

As Maddie Hyde reflected on her interview with Nguyen, she noted the two share a mutual friend.

"I realized that we have more in common than I thought," she said.