Multiculturalism
Links to
Multiculturalism
Student
Research
with Mrs. Abercrombie's kindergarten classes
I
am fortunate to teach in a school that reflects Canadian
multiculturalism
very strongly. My
class is made up of students from many different backgrounds.
We
have Aboriginal, African, Caucasian, Chinese, Filipino, Spanish
and Vietnamese
Children in our class. Some
of these children are brand new to Canada, many
were born here but their parents came to Canada from other
places, and some
have long histories in Canada.
A majority of the children speak languages other
than English.
Because
of the relevance to my class, I decided to focus our study of
Canada
on multiculturalism. The
first research task that I placed before my students
was for them to find out where they came from.
I sent home a letter to parents describing
the assignment and sheet of paper.
Each family was asked to sit
down with their child and talk about how they came to live in
Canada. These
stories were then returned to school and shared with the class.
From the stories the children learned why people come to Canada
from other places (in
our class most came for freedom from wars) and they learned
about their special background.
Please
click on the pictures to get a larger image.
Multicultural Math Activity
To extend our study of
multiculturalism in Canada we did a math activity that involved
sorting and graphing. To
begin with, we made a list of all the different cultures
represented in our class. I
wrote these along the bottom of a piece of chart paper.
To help with the sorting and graphing, I wrote each in a
different color.
Then I brought out
some unifix cubes that corresponded to the same colors that the
cultures were written in. Each
student had to decide what culture he or she belonged to and
what color of unifix cube he or she should have.
Once everyone had a unifix cube (a couple children had 2
cubes because they were, for example, Vietnamese and Chinese),
they had to sort themselves.
They walked around and found everyone else with the same
color and therefore with the same cultural background.
The different
groups sat down together and I gave a few minutes to allow them
to talk. The
conversations were interesting as many did not realize that we
had so many different groups in our class and some had not
noticed that there were other people the same as them.
They all wanted to see who was in each group and they got
very excited about it. It
was amazing to see their innocence as I realized that they had
not seen before the connection between hair and skin color and
cultural groups. One
of the children asked me if I was Vietnamese, which I am clearly
not. We got into a
discussion then about how different cultures look different and
how beautiful it is to look around and see the different people.
Next, each child
had a chance to come up and put his or her unifix cube on the
graph. I used tape to stick the bottom cubes on the paper and taped
every 3rd or 4th cube as needed.
There was so much excitement as the children watched the
towers grow. Giggles
were heard and heads kept straining to see the results as each
child had a turn.
This activity
would not have been complete without a good discussion about the
results. We talked about the cultures with the most children in our
class and the one’s with the least.
We also noticed that some had the same number of people. We talked about how we are all friends and how neat it is to
have so many different kinds of friends.
Everyone agreed that our class was certainly special for
having so many different people!
To sum up, each
child drew a picture of some of his or her friends.
We wrote down the names of the friends and the culture of
each friend. The
children kept this page in their Canada research booklets.
|
