Cultural Studies: Winter, Week 6

Over the last few weeks, I've been showing the children a National Geographic book that has a lot of great photos of kids being kids all over the world. This week specifically, I made a point of really emphasizing the beautiful diversity of the different places children come from, and even then, that there are so many things that make us all the same. We all eat food. We all where clothes. We all go to school. We all have families. We all do chores, etc. It was great to see how their eyes lit up when I deliberately took a long time for them to see the pictures while I read the few words that accompanied them. For things that they recognized that they do as well, which was nearly every page of the book, they all exclaimed, "I eat pancakes" or "I go to school and we're at school right now." One picture in particular showed a boy herding cows as an evening chore, and we all were amazed at how "silly" but difficult that must be. Connecting their knowledge of what they know and experience every day with ideas of what children millions of feet away are doing, has been invaluable for starting to grasp the concept of different cultures and ways of life.