With the new school year now in full swing, continuing to build a community that fosters a sense of belonging is so valuable. There are lots of great ways to tackle this goal throughout the year, but one of the best ways can be through including the unique backgrounds of your students’ parents and families. When you intentionally invite their parents and families into the classroom to share things like heritage food, clothing, language, and culture, your little learners experience a very rich sense of belonging. In addition, their classmates learn to embrace diversity in all of its forms. In today’s article we will discuss the importance of using parent and family background as an asset and the benefits that come along with it.
Sharing food is a universal way to bring people together, and it can be an excellent avenue to celebrate different cultures. Invite parents to bring in dishes from their country of origin and share them with your students. This can be an opportunity for students to try new foods and to learn about backgrounds other than their own. This experience could impact student learning in a number of positive ways and could easily lead to activities like creating simple Venn diagrams and graphs when discussing different ingredients used in certain dishes or creating class cookbooks with recipes from each child’s home!