Yesterday, Cuadros hit on a topic that I've been thinking about since then: the children of immigrants. I agree with Cuadros that we shouldn't discriminate against children who had no choice to come to America or not. What I want to ask is this:
In our classrooms, we will have students who are immigrants and do not know our language or culture. What kinds of things (activities, lessons, etc.) can we do to help these students acclimate and feel like a part of the classroom?

Whitney, I have too worried about how to include children from different cultures in the classroom. I think one great way to include them would be, if they were comfortable with it, to have them share something unique about their culture that might not be well-known here in the US. I think this would be a great way to share cultural awareness with the whole class and to hopefully get the children in your classroom to have a more vested interest in the immigrant child. At the same time I worry that this could single them out and make them the object of ridicule. For this not to happen you would have to handle the situation carefully and make sure your class understood that ridiculing behavior is not acceptable. You could also do this as a general assignment for the whole class to participate in to encourage children to celebrate the differences within their classroom.

While reading this book over the summer I thought of the same things. I had thought of the same thing Candace suggested but I also thought of asking the Spanish teacher at your school if she could help you understand their culture and things to do to help them feel included. I know that just because she teaches Spanish does not mean that she knows everything about the culture of the kids in your class but its worth it to ask.

When I was in 2nd grade we had a student from Vietnam that spoke NO English. I remember that we had Index card labels in English on everything around the classroom to help him. A few examples:
The water fountain was labeled "Water"
Somewhere on the wall there was a "Wall" label.

I am not sure how much this helped the student, but it was a good effort on the teacher's part.
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Audrey Fowler

I believe these are ideas great, but something I thought of that would benefit our classroom and the school as a whole is to be a supporter to the administration how important bilingual teachers are. Also, invite speakers like Cuadros to come to the schools to speak and encourage the student body to embrace the students that are trying to learn the English language instead of like at my school where these students were made fun of and not supported.