I teach Pre-K, Kindergarten, and 1st grade English Language Learners. My students come to my classroom from all over the world. Our town is very diverse and the students are very proud of their home languages and cultures.
My students currently speak 12 languages!
My ELLs get so excited when we we read a book that is either in their language or represents their culture. They enjoy sharing about themselves and seeing themselves represented in a book helps students communicate as they are still learning English.
My Project
My goal is to incorporate more multicultural book titles into my classroom so that my English Language Learners can see themselves, their cultures, and their language reflected in the books that we read and have in our library.
Adding these books into our classroom library will inspire a lifelong love of reading!
I would like to add ‘mirrors’ for my students to reflect their cultures and diverse backgrounds by incorporating materials into their school day that are representative of themselves. This idea came from the National SEED (Seeking educational equity and diversity) Project ‘Curriculum as Window and Mirror’ (https://nationalseedproject.org/curriculum-as-window-and-mirror):
“This brief paper will explore the need for curriculum to function both as window and as mirror, in order to reflect and reveal most accurately both a multicultural world and the student herself or himself. If the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self, education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education which is committed to affirming the essential dialectic between the self and the world. In other words, education engages us in "the great conversation" between various frames of reference.”
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