Thanksgiving is quickly approaching, but did you know that November is also National Native American Heritage month? During this time, be intentional about using terms that value and respect all people and avoid stereotyping by planning lessons and using materials that celebrate Native American heritage and traditions. For example, steer away from creating “Indian headbands”… Read more »
Tag: Diversity
Pretending Can Build Literacy Skills
One of the many joys of being an early childhood educator is watching and developing children’s growing imaginations. Symbolic behavior play is related to the understanding of a representational system like written language and language behavior in dramatic play is related to literate language (Mielonen, Paterson, 2009). Children are also developing their oral language skills… Read more »
Culturally Responsive Literacy – Día de los Muertos
What are you learning about with your students? Fall to Winter in the PreK-3 classroom usually means one thing – holidays. While we know you’re busy picking books, scripting plays, making treats, and coordinating your holiday teacher sweaters, we thought the season was ripe for recommending some fresh ideas for doing holidays inclusively with your young… Read more »
Translanguaging for Young Literacy Learners
We live in an increasingly complex, multilingual society where young children from a variety of ethnic, racial, and linguistic backgrounds work together to learn literacy in our classrooms. As we’ve written about before, there are many different Englishes (Fu et al., 2019). Our emergent bilingual students, in particular, will bring diverse English practices that include… Read more »
Rich Language Modeling in Diverse Books
As you’re working to diversify your library, you might consider exploring the linguistic diversity of the students in your classroom and in American society at large. Linguistically diverse children’s books can help accomplish this! Read below to learn a bit more about dialects of English and speakers of English as a new language, then find… Read more »
Diversifying Your Library
As you choose books for your classroom library, be sure that all children are represented in your selections. Include books with characters, authors, and illustrators representative of different ethnicities, races, cultures, abilities, and family structures. Buying books is not the only way to expand your library’s inventory. Consider visiting your local library and borrowing books… Read more »