Glen Education Sacred Heart

Exploring Diversity

Grace Kelleher, Early Childhood Teacher

This year our group has focused on connections. We have connected through sharing our similarities and differences. For our group this has been through sharing our family culture. Many children were lucky enough to travel to see family from overseas or interstate this year, children would often supply photos and talk to the group about their holiday. Numerous children from our group just settled in Australia from overseas in the beginning of 2023. We had rich discussions about the diversity of our classroom and participated in occasions such as Harmony Day, Mid-Autumn Festival, Children’s Day and Diwali. We asked families to share ideas and participate in the program, through cooking, reading stories or demonstrating arts and crafts. These weren’t one off celebrations; we regularly interweaved these perspectives into our program. We frequently:

• Discussed different ways to say hello
• Discussed different names for mum, dad, grandma, and grandpa.
• Experimented with counting to 10 in Mandrin, Japanese, Italian, French, and Hindi.
• As a group we learnt the colours of the rainbow in Auslan, Japanese, and Mandarin and we use those almost everyday to send children off the mat.
• We asked children to write letters and draw pictures to their loved once that were interstate or overseas and we mailed them in the mailbox together.
• Learnt Key Word Sign that was relevant to communicate with a child in our group

The children relished these moments to share their culture. It’s vital that children feel comfortable and connected to their kindergarten community, so they feel seen for who they are, who their family is and who they’d like to be. Teaching children about their similarities and differences in these ways inherently teaches them to respect others who may be different to them and to value equality. Learning about diversity will always be worthy of children’s time.