The World is in my Classroom

This week, the learning objective for Social Studies has been for students to understand that many of the families in our community originally came from countries all over the world. Wednesday night, I had them interview their parents about their family's cultural heritage. Yesterday, we pulled it all together through a crafts project.

I had each child create the flag of the country their family most identifies with. By the end of the day, I had seen 13 different flags... there are 13 countries represented in my classroom! Well, technically there's only 12... Palestine is not officially recognized as a country, but you get the idea.

In all, we had America, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Romania, El Salvador, Cuba, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, and Palestine. Take a look at the ones hanging in the hallway...


That's so amazing to me - I've never been in a place where I had so much diversity! With all of this excitement in my classroom, I decided that I wanted to take this to a school-wide level. I've proposed a project to my principal where my students would survey the student body at Miller to see how many different countries we have represented at our school.

The grand idea is to change our mono-chromatic cafeteria that reeks of institutionalism into a bright, colorful representation of the diversity in our school through the use of flags.

Hopefully, my principal will be onboard and will give me the go-ahead to get this started. I think I can really get my students invested in this project, based on the excitement level we had in class yesterday. The worst that could happen would be a group of students from America engage in a conversation over their smiley-face french fries about where Romania is.