Since we have been talking about cultures here is a thought. What cultures will you teach in your classroom. Will you just teach the ones in your class or not teach it at all if you did not have any differences. Maybe you will teach a select few but there is no way to cover all cultures, so how do you know which ones to cover?

One interseting way to share a variety of cultures would be by having children discuss their own. They could do a geneology-research-social studies-presentation about their ancestral homelands. Otherwise, I also like the idea of pointing out days when other cultures are celebrating around the world, which would generate interest, awareness, and discussion.

Yesterday at my internship at Lenoir Middle School, the art teacher was helping my 6th grade students find their ancestry heralds. In art class their assignment was to recreate their heraldry sheild. I saw each of the students get really excited about their heritage. Once the students have recreated their family crests they get to present it to the class. That seems to me to be one way students can be proud of their heritage and their family names.

I think Lauren has a wonderful idea here. Focusing on the cultures that are within the classroom because we all know it would be impossible to expose each child to ALL the different cultures that make up this world. They also may gain interest from one culture and may want to go out and learn more about another one!! Incorporating culture exposure would def. be easy to do by pointing out the different days that cultures celebrate. And I feel that this can be started at an early age because most of the time kids don't learn about culture until they get at little bit older.

I also agree with what others have posted about having children share their cultures in the classroom. I think that you can really integrate the learning of many other cultures in almost any kind of unit that you are teaching in a classroom. I plan to teach a lot of my English in thematic units and have a variety of materials to pull information from, so that other cultures and ideas are brought to light for my students in a way that will feel comfortable, but also exciting to them. I think everyone should want to teach their students about all cultures!

I think it is a wonderful enrichment to include culture as much as possible. I just taught a culture lesson to EC (exceptional children) 8th graders, and they could not tell me what culture meant or what made up a culture. Where have they fallen through the cracks? I am very interested in teaching culture now with the reactions i recieved. My cooperating teacher did tell me that it just wasn't a pressed issue for them. It is sad really. Every question that i asked them I got the same answer...mexican. I found out they were more prejudice about mexicans than any other ethnicity. I was talking about china and they helped me read a story, when they came to the word china, they would say mexican. I just found that peculiar.

I think it would be good to celebrate the cultures in the classroom but also bring in cultures that are mentioned in history. We teach American history but this involves other countries. Why not take a few min. to take a different perspective than the American perspective and teach students to consider other cultures that affect our nation.

I think cultural differences are important for the classroom. I think we should teach the different cultures in the classroom but there are other cultures that the children are going to be exposed to maybe not in the classroom but in life. We cannot hide things and let them learn them along the way. If we are going to teach different cultures than we should at least hit most of them. Maybe focus more on the ones in the classroom but lets not forget the ones that we can come in contact each day.