Celebrating Diversity in the Classroom

The school I interned at hosted  a Multicultural Day to celebrate and educate our youth and their families about various cultures that are represented amongst the families at our school. Some of the cultures that were represented were the following: Egyptian, West African, Asian, Latin, Jamaican, Portuguese, and many more!

During the fair, several dishes were prepared for people to sample, live music from around the world was performed by our band teacher on the bass and his friend who is a guitarist, and there were a number of arts and crafts, as well as games students and their families could engage in like calligraphy and origami.

In order to kick off our Multicultural Fair day, we read a few books to help my students understand that we all are different in many ways, but that we should celebrate and embrace our differences because those aspects of ourselves make us special in our own way. The following are the books we read!  

After reading Elmer during Shared Reading, my students completed a writing activity for one of their literacy centers. They had to respond to the following prompt: "I am one of a kind like Elmer because..." 




Materials:
*Tissue Paper (cut into squares)
*Construction Paper (cut into squares)
*Glue
*Elmer Worksheet template)
*"I am One of a Kind" Worksheet
*Pencil

In correspondence with reading Corduroy during Shared Reading, my class completed an activity to demonstrated that they still accept and love Corduroy just the way he is.

 

 Materials:

*Construction Paper (brown and various other colorful paper)
*Scissors
*Glue
*1 Button (for each student)
*Googly Eyes
*Markers