5 Countries in 5 Days

One of my favorite weeks in 2nd grade was our multicultural week. Each day we focused on a different country. We really immersed the students in that country. For instance, on the day we studied China our morning message, which is placed on a PowerPoint slide contained clip art showing a chinese dragon and some chinese writing. I even showed my SBTE how to insert sound so we had chinese music on our PowerPoint slide. Throughout the morning I would pick a student who was on task and ask them to play the sound clip. I wore a shirt that had chinese writing. We hung lanterns with chinese writing. Our early morning read aloud was The Five Chinese Brothers. Our Language focus that week was the story of Cinderella. The students were able to hear and/or read The Persian Cinderella, Adelita, The Talking Egg (an African American tale similar to Cinderella) and do various compare/contrast activities using this literature such as, a content frame, a venn diagram, and a quadrant.

Each table of students had a bucket of books with stories from each of the countries. We rotated these buckets daily so that children were able to read books from each culture. We continued this activity into the next week.

They had a center time each day where they made a craft from the different countries. I also researched games from that country and we played one each day. We had several speakers come and talk to the children and bring in artifacts from their country. One speaker was a parent who attends our on campus parent center. We used resources from our library and children brought in artifacts to share as well. We set up mini museums each day with artifacts from the various countries. The children loved showing and telling about their various artifacts. On Friday we had a feast and the children rotated between four tables where they were served a sampling of food from Africa, Mexico, India and China.

My only criticism was there wasn't enough time. There never is enough time, but I believe all the 2nd grade teachers were in agreement that they would like to extend this unit to at least two weeks next year.