Because of the varied nature of the family and living situations of children today, it’s important to focus on teaching diversity to preschoolers in a way that helps them understand and respect the different situations of their peers.
The children at your preschool will come from all walks of life. Your center’s community is made up of families of different cultures, religions, skin colors, and financial backgrounds. Family units may include single-parent families, blended families, or families with two moms or two dads. Children may be living with their birth parents, in a foster home, or with adoptive families – the possibilities are truly endless.
Unfortunately, in many childcare centers, cultural diversity is primarily taught during holidays or special events, when educators find it easy to incorporate lessons of different cultures’ ways of celebrating major occasions like Christmas or Hanukkah. In the industry, many refer to this scenario as the “tourist approach”, since it only allows preschoolers a brief glimpse into the true nature and traditions of a culture for a limited period of time, and is often highly generalized and not representative of the personal traditions of that culture.
How to support diversity throughout the year
Manyearly childhood educators are calling for diversity to be celebrated throughout the year to reinforce acceptance and respect of the cultural backgrounds and family situations of all children in a classroom. The following are some suggestions to better integrate culture into your curriculum and advice on teaching diversity to preschoolers.
Involve parents in teaching diversity.
Ask parents if they are willing to pay a visit to your classroom to share a cultural custom or family tradition. This could be a song, dance, story, traditional food, or craft to make.
Ensure your toys, books, and materials are diverse.
Select books, dolls, and craft supplies that represent a wide range of ethnicities so they can be incorporated into daily play and curriculum activities.
Introduce sing-along songs with multicultural themes and lyrics in different languages.
Pair these songs with a similarly-themed story to reinforce the idea of diversity and acceptance.
Let children ask questions about different physical characteristics and practices among cultures.
Facilitating open discussion about these differences lets children know it is okay to notice them, and encourages appropriate discussion about them.
When talking about a particular holiday, ensure you also give time to the other important holidays from varying cultures.
This means more than talking about Hanukkah or Kwanzaa – plan lessons about Diwali, Ramadan, Chinese New Year, and others.
Interested in a better way to plan your preschool curriculum to ensure the celebration of diversity? Early childhood educators like you can benefit from a comprehensive childcare management app such as HiMama, which is designed to make your lesson planning easy! Learn more about our childcare app.
How do you celebrate diversity in your classroom? Join the conversation at@HiMamaSocialand make sure to sign up for updates from ourHiMama Blog for articles on similar content in the future!
FOOD. Of course food is an important part of every culture. ...
PLAY. Play is one of the most important ways in which young children all over the world develop cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally. ...
Many child care centers often the tourist approach for teaching cultural diversity to young children. The tourist approach refers to only learning about cultural differences or traditions around the holidays when it is convenient to teach. However, this only gives children a small glimpse into different cultures.
For children, the sooner they have contact with cultural diversity, the more they will develop the capacity for solidarity, empathy, knowledge, and respect for everything that diverges from their practices.
Select books, stories, songs, and materials that reflect diverse cultures, languages, and perspectives. Introduce children to characters, settings, and themes from various cultural backgrounds to broaden their understanding and appreciation of diversity.
Tourist approach: an approach where differences are overemphasized and exaggerated; where children learn superficially about different cultures. Non-biased approach: an approach that avoids stereotypes and focuses on an authentic learning environment where similarities and differences are acknowledged.
In our work, we categorize these efforts into three approaches: building representational diversity (what we can see and count), fostering interactional diversity (the capacity to engage diversity effectively), and committing to structural diversity (how an organization or institution enacts this commitment).
Cultural tourism experiences include, but are not limited to, architectural and archaeological treasures, culinary activities, festivals or events, historic or heritage, sites, monuments and landmarks, museums and exhibitions, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, and religious venues.
Early years settings should provide a wide range of resources and materials that reflect the diversity of the children and families they serve. This can include books, toys, pictures, and other materials that feature people from different backgrounds, cultures, and abilities.
For example, broaden history lessons so that they encompass the world beyond United States history and culture. Or, use references and analogies to other cultures in your lessons and assignments to help students with diverse backgrounds personally connect.
Teachers should give unbiased answers to questions about gender, race, ethnicity and physical ability. Teachers should acknowledge, not ignore, cultural diversity. School staff should appreciate the differences and similarities between students of different races, ethnicities, genders and physical abilities.
Teach your child about diversity by explaining to him that even within his own group, people are different and that there is no one standard that is better than the others. You can also do this by asking him how he would feel if all of his toys were the same or if all of the crayons in the box were the same color.
Culture is a pattern of behavior shared by a society, or group of people. Many different things make up a society's culture. These things include food, language, clothing, tools, music, arts, customs, beliefs, and religion.
What Is Culture In Early Childhood Education? Basically, cultural diversity in early education for young children involves children from different cultures mixing and mingling with one another in the same centre, as well as children learning more about other cultures, differences and acceptance of those differences.
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