An international week in an elementary school!

As I talked about diversity in my last article and also about my students coming from different cultural backgrounds, we’ve celebrated the International Mother Tongue Week at school and my goal for the week was to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity.

Everyone was happily involved in all the activities: Students, teachers and parents!

My goal was to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and everyone was there to participate!

Let’s start the week!

We started our week with an inquiry based provocation for the students to find out what the event is all about.

Here is the material needed:

• Easel
• Sticky notes
• Felt pens
• Globe if possible
• Some books representing different cultures and languages as a resourceWe, as professors, involved some open-ended questions to see how our students would respond:
• What do you think is happening during the week?
• Put your thoughts on the sticky notes.

Students were quite engaged and came up with possible answers on why we celebrate diversity. They were so enthusiastic!

They came up with many possible things they did during the week and what possible activities they would be doing during the main event.
This activity basically provides the students to be prepared and gain knowledge, before they experience the main event..

Activities in the International Mother Tongue Week

This week was hectic, but full of joy!

It included tons of activities. Here are some of them:

• Creating welcome signs in multi- languages for families as they enter the school.
• Colouring flags from different countries for the parade.
• Reading from the parents/ staff in their mother tongue language.
• Preparation of traditional games played in the countries by the parents.

There were also incredible exhibitions on cultural diversity, and once again, parents were extremely involved in this particular activity!

Actually, they also participated along with teachers in food stalls and making the costumes for the students.

It was all about teamwork!

We started with our International parade representing different countries. We had different types of food from around the world and the students shared their cultural heritage (costumes, dances…)

All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world.

So what happened during the Mother Tongue Week?

We wanted to do something special with parents which is why we involved them in the reading activities!

• Monday – Reading in Thai by Khun Blue
• Tuesday –  Reading in English by Trevor
• Wednesday – Reading in Chinese by Khun Kung
• Thursday- Reading in Japanese by Sarah’s mom

As for the activities to be followed during the week, this is what we mainly did:

• Colouring of flags: Students will be colouring flags from the country they are representing as a class.
• Passports: Students will be writing their names and colouring their passports.
• Preparation of the International Parade, which is, basically, the representation of the countries given to each homeroom.

This year, we’ve focused on 6 important stations since most of our students come from these countries:

Station 1: USA

Station 2: Australia

Station 3: UK

Station 4: China

Station 5: Japan

Station 6: Thailand

 

We followed the activities on these stations by other ones:

• Mapping: The students will fill out several things and find out where they are from on the map.
• Paper dolls around the world: Colouring the dolls, dressing them up and guessing what country they are from.
• Photo Booth: The funniest way to take pictures and keep good memories of this great weak!

Celebrating diversity is what we were looking for during this week, and we not only learnt about different cultures but the entire school worked as one strong team.

Everyone was so proud of the outcome and parents were thrilled to get involved in their childrens’ school life!