Grade 2 students have been inquiring into different cultural perspectives that influence the way people express and understand ideas.
The children were given the opportunity to play the Amazing Cultural Race. They had to “travel” to multiple countries, where they were to perform specific tasks together. These challenges were related to a culture of that country. One destination was Kenya where they did the Maasai dance, another destination was New Zealand where they watched the Haka and posed “Haka style”. They also were shown the ‘hongi: a sacred Maori greeting from New Zealand. In their visit to Bhutan, they had to respectfully refuse cookies offered to them (the Bhutanese manner) by saying ‘“meshu, meshu”. Another destination was Malaysia where they played a bean bag game called Batu Seremban and when they went to Japan, they wrote the word peace in Japanese after learning the story of Sadako Sasaki. A final destination was to Bangladesh where they learned of the saree and the bindi as well as its meaning for this culture.
The purpose of this experience was to move away from the 5 F’s of culture (food, festival, fashion, famous people and flags) and go deeper into what culture is. The students reflected and saw connections throughout the different cultural experiences as well as state what certain cultures reminded them of.
