Celebrating our Multicultural Class at TCEE

This year our three-year-old class, the Dubim, is blessed with students from all over the world.  Taking full advantage of our parents and the internet, we decided to study a little bit about each of the cultures represented.  We started by identifying where each child is from using Google Maps and our classroom world map.

Maps

 

Check out our interactive map and classroom map:




View Dubim in a larger map

Questions

We asked the student what they wanted to learn about the different nations.  This student did not want to speak, so I typed her questions into the program for her.  Here are her questions:


Student Questions

Flags

We then looked up the flags.  Working as a group, we created flags from each nation and then worked on individual flags to display then take home.

USA and Belgium

     

Brazil

South Korea

Israel

We created a matching game with the flags.

Here the students are describing our wall of flags and how we made them.

Parent Participation

When the parents came in, they showed us pictures of houses, played games, sang songs, and read books in their native languages.  We played an origami based game for Japan, and ate waffles for Belgium.  (They were delicious!)  Here is the recipe for the waffles - in Metric, of course!

Ingredients:
250g ordinary flour, 250g castor sugar, 250g butter, 4 eggs, vanilla sugar or extract to taste

Preparation:
Mix the flour and sugar. Blend in melted butter and the 4 egg yolks. Mix well. Whip egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form peaks. Blend them into the mixture along with the vanilla. Important! Leave the dough to sit for at least three hours before cooking.

Then I heat my waffle iron to the max, to then reduce heat and start baking at a good speed. This means your first two waffles are always slightly burnt, but you are making a batch anyway so just throw those out :-) I always lightly brush the inside before baking the first waffle, but I don't repeat that afterwards. The trick is to not open the iron until you hear the sizzling stop, otherwise you will tear the waffles apart.

Languages

Children are always interested in birthdays.  One of the ways we looked at the various cultures was by watching a video of the song, "Happy Birthday" in Korean.  The children were delighted.







We learned to say "Hello" in all the languages represented in the classroom.  The children from the various countries helped us with the pronunciations.

Student Comments

Finally, some of the children commented on what they had learned.  They picked Avitars, backgrounds, and then recorded their comments.