Welcoming Families From Around the World

The name of my families country or origin is from many differ areas of the world. I consider myself African American. However I have a grandfather who is half American Indian and Caucasian, who married an African American woman. I also have a great-grand-father who is Italian who married a African Italian and a great-grand-mother who is half African American and half Caucasian.  My father was fair skin and my mother is fair skin also all of my brothers and sisters are fair skin. However we all can see who pick up which ethnic genes some of us have blonde hair and blue eyes some have light brown hair with green hazel eyes and some have dark brown hair with dark brown eyes. My dad had dark brown hair with gray hazel eyes and my mom has dark brown hair with dark brown hair.

The story in our text tell a story about a little girl name Beth who brought a CD if country music to school to share with her class and her mother became embarrassed, but Beth told her mother that the CD was part of her culture that she wanted to share. The teacher went on to explain to Beth’s mom that she had encourage the children to bring things from home that reflect their daily life and that they called it Culture Share. She went on to let Beth’s mom know that the class enjoyed listening to the music that Beth loves.  I love this ideal, this is something I would encourage all of my teachers to incorporate in their lesson plans.  I would also educate myself as well as my staff about the different cultures in our community that would be apart of our school through research. We would also have parent’s night out at least six times or more a year to share their different cultures such as  food, music, dancing, language, holidays and the country of their origin or anything else that the parents wants to share about their cultures. I would also have guess speakers from different country of origin come in as in house field trips to share their cultures. I will also have foods added to the menus form all the different cultures around the world and the families in our school as well as books, toys and dress up clothing in the dramatic  for the child to play with on an everyday basses.

My hopes for these preparations is that the children as well as their parent feel apart of our school. I also want the parent to feel that their children are happy to be at our school and that they will lean the same as all the children in the school, and as it stated in our text that “Teachers and families should work toward developing mutual respect—with families recognizing that teachers may well know more about children in groups and children’s development in general, and with teachers recognizing that families know more about their child in particular. Both types of knowledge are necessary for children to flourish.”

Reference

Derman-Sparks, L., & Edwards, J. O. (2010). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).