Guest Posted July 28, 2015 Posted July 28, 2015 Hi all, i've always thought that demonstrating that practitioners/setting value, encourage and respect childrens' diverse backgrounds and home languages should be more than just about having some words printed in other languages and stuck around the room ( this is a basic thing i think we should do). But what else/how else can we provide opportunities for children to share their languages, culture, how can we support their home languages (i am familiar with the hello song being sung in different languages).? has anyone come across or carried out some sort of reflection/audit in this area within their setting before? what kinds of things did you cover and come across? Salus
Guest Posted July 28, 2015 Posted July 28, 2015 We do this (briefly) each year to ensure that our ever-changing population is reflected by the school. Most recently we have added multi-cultural families and differently-abled people to our Happyland sets, extended our range of bilingual books and asked parents to bring boxes so the different community shops are represented in our 'shops' and in the 'junk modelling'. Previously we have spent money on dressing up clothes, art work, cooking equipment and resources to support counting in different languages. I'm sure they're are loads more, these are just recent examples of updates we have made.
AnonyMouse_73 Posted July 29, 2015 Posted July 29, 2015 There is a diversity scale in the ECERS E book, which can help frame discussions in your setting. Also look at the EMTAS website, its based in the southwest and there may be an equivalent service where you live, but they have some documents available free. One things I always found helpful, was having real items from other cultures in the role play so for example Polish newspapers or Polish food boxes and tins (or Chinese or whatever culture is most relevant to you). I also found talking tins or talking photo albums really good for hearing English alongside another language. We used to get a range of these from TTS (Im sure other companies do them too). We'd get parents or older siblings to record the word in the photos in eg Arabic, then in English. We made the books ourselves around different themes eg areas in the room, fruit, furniture, people, basically everyday room vocabulary. The chidlren would enjoy looking at these and hearing their mum/dad/sibling. We used smaller versions of the same idea for settling in, with photos of the family, their house, pets etc
Guest Posted August 20, 2015 Posted August 20, 2015 Oh thank you for all those ideas!will look into that service
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