Families around the World *Freebie*

The last week of our “Who We Are” unit is devoted to helping students develop an understanding of the existence of different cultures throughout the world. We will be doing this by comparing food, families, houses, and schools in the US to food, families, houses, and schools in other countries. 

Over four days, we will be watching trailers of the “Families of the World” series on YouTube to make our comparisons. Each day, we will locate a new country on a world map. Then, the students will make and draw predictions about what they think food, families, houses, or schools will look like in that country. Following their predictions, we will watch and discuss the “Families of the World” trailers and see how their initial predications were similar to, or different from, what they saw. 

Day 1: Families of the Philippines - Homes

Day 2: Families of Kenya – Family

Day 3: Families of China – Food

Day 4: Families of Costa Rica – School

The students will record their predictions and what they learned in a booklet, which you can download for free from our TPT store by clicking on the sample page below!

Multi-Cultural Writing Activity *Freebie*

(The book has red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple included.)

This book is a great beginning of the year writing activity.  Each day in Writer’s Workshop we complete a mini lesson on brainstorming.  As a class, we think of all the different items that are the color of the page we are working on.  Ex. Red: apples, fire truck, barn, etc.  The students then go back to their seats and pick one item to “write” about.  Because it is the beginning of Kindergarten, we are mostly looking for detailed pictures, but words are welcome!  We then walk around and scribe for the students. We ask them to come up with the beginning letter of the item they are drawing to assess their letter sounds recognition. 

At the end of the color book, we read the story “The Color of Us” by Karen Katz.  We discuss how we may all look different on the outside, but we all are good people on the inside.  We give the kids multi cultural crayons so that they can pick out their own skin color.  This is fun, because there are so many shades that the students who think they are “white” or “black” see that there are many shades within those colors.  They then draw a detailed picture of themselves.  This lesson is really a great way for students to see that we all come from different backgrounds but that we all can get along and work together.  

Press here to download this free document from our TPT page!