Cultural Celebrations

Dear Families,

Last week, we started our Social Studies unit looking at culture and cultural celebrations. Our second grade definition of culture is the shared practices and shared beliefs of a group of people.

I told students that culture is hard for even adults to understand and that it is helpful to compare culture to an iceberg -- where 10% is above the surface (visible) but 90% is below the water (invisible). Practices are the visible parts of culture and beliefs are the invisible part. All people have culture and we examined our own classroom culture with a quick writing exercise where we pretended to be extraterrestrials who were invisibly observing our classroom. One pair of students wrote about how the small humans were looking at rectangles with lots of squiggles for a long time. Other students were able to guess that it was reading and that in our classroom culture we believe that reading is important for learning and life in general.

The image I included is a popular representation of culture as an iceberg. It is a lot more nuanced than what we made in our classroom, but along the same lines.

The cultural celebrations we have been and will  be researching, reading and writing about are Diwali, Vesak, Hanukkah, Ramadan, and Christmas. Last Thursday and Friday, we started learning about Diwali. I was heartened by how engaged and open your students are when learning about new cultural practices and beliefs. It makes me feel optimistic about the future of and feel luck to be a teacher.

And now for some silly hats and hair...