I can’t wait to share five easy teacher tips to help cultivate a very positive cultural classroom. I love morning meetings, especially at this time in our lives, are more critical than ever. So greetings are my top pick to help out. If you use Google Translate, you can find languages from all over the world just for a simple Hello or good morning.
My family comes from the Vai tribe in Liberia. So in my classroom, I’ve always used the Vai greeting of Hello, “Yahkuneh,”(phonetically spelling-sorry grandma LOL), which means hello. It always gets us on a very energetic date. After my greeting, I love to do an enjoyable sharing activity. One of my favorite activities I love to share is when one of my students can pick a country of the day. And then they can research one remarkable fact that they’ve never heard of before. To make my students dig a little deeper. You know, we always love that higher-order thinking y’all. We always eliminate an animal or a portion of food. I want them to find out more facts about countries. We love fun brain breaks. And I love finding enjoyable multicultural games as well.
One of my favorite multicultural games. Well, it wasn’t really a game kind of punishment. But I digress. We call it Pump Tire. Now, some of y’all Liberian folk understand when we would get in trouble, our grandmothers would say, Go pump tire. No, there wasn’t an actual tire anything, so calm down. But it was kind of like a yoga pose, or we cross our arms and tug at our ears, and then do squats. So I think our grandmothers were way beyond their time. When I get ready for lunch and recess, every teacher’s favorite part of the day. I call this song a very fun traditional lunch song. It doesn’t really have a name that I know of mainly, but many Liberians grew up singing this song, and it’s between a mother and her children. And it’s a fun call and response song. And it gets my students that signal that it’s time to line up for lunch.
Next is finding quotes. I love famous quotes by multicultural people from all over the world, and one of my favorite resources is finding quotes from our Nobel Peace Prize winners. And like I said, these are winners from all across the humanities, and what I do, and then my students and I discuss the importance of that quote and how it can help guide us for the rest of the week. So there you have it, five easy teacher tips to help keep that positive cultural vibe going in your classroom. Because the more we know about each other, the better we can understand who we indeed are.
