Families Sharing Their Cultures in the Classroom

Today we had a very special guest for J week. Kyo invited (actually volunteered) his mom, Yoko, to come in and share their Japanese culture. Each week we spend Thursday lunch time planning our activities for the next week, and often the children share ideas they have for the future. Usually their ideas are, in reality, things they are volunteering you, their parents, to come and do in our classroom. For example, Eliot has been volunteering his dad to come in and make pimento cheese sandwiches with the class for P week since the start of school. As you can imagine, their ideas are very important to them, often reflecting things that are unique to them, and quite honestly mostly revolve around food (maybe we shouldn't discuss this at tlunchtime?). Eliot has pimento cheese sandwiches for lunch on occasion and so the conversation started, no-one else knew what a pimento cheese sandwich was, and thus commenced the volunteering of his parents to come in and share…don’t worry, Eliot’s dad has already been informed and is totally on board. 😊

 

This morning we shared a little of Kyo’s home culture. Over the past few months, the children have been enthralled by Kyo’s rice balls in his lunch box, not least because there is something in them that dyes some of the rice purple (Japanese basil). Our interest was already piqued, and the children were thrilled to be part of the process of making and tasting the aforementioned rice balls. The children rolled the rice balls and wrapped them in seaweed. Each child had at least two. There were two different kinds, one was rice with the basil and the other one was made with dried tuna, sesame seeds and soy sauce. Kannon, Kyo's older sister, came over from her classroom for a while and taught us how to make origami foxes. It was all a big hit. Thank you so much to Yoko, Kyo and Kannon for sharing.