Welcoming Families From Around the World

For this assignment, imagine the following scenario:

You are working in an early childhood setting of your choice—a hospital, a child care center, a social service agency. You receive word that the child of a family who has recently emigrated from a country you know nothing about will join your group soon. You want to prepare yourself to welcome the child and her family. Luckily, you are enrolled in a course about diversity and have learned that in order to support families who have immigrated you need to know more than surface facts about their country of origin.

The name of “your” family’s country of origin: CHINA

At least five ways in which you will prepare yourself to be culturally responsive towards this family: 

1.) Be very welcoming and warm. Be accepting, making the family feel comfortable, showing them around the classroom and communicating with them in the best way I know how. 

2.) Create and integrate lesson plans and curriculum that will allow the students to learn about diversity/culture/other countries. Prepare assignments for the students that will let them know how there are many different types of people in the world and each one should be loved.

3.) Recognize my own biases and fix those!

4.) Become aware and knowledgeable about the family and their background/culture.

5.) Form study groups where I will be able to read culturally responsive literature that reflects the identities of the students in the classroom.

A brief statement describing in what ways you hope that these preparations will benefit both you and the family: I hope that these preparations will benefit both me and the families. I feel it is important to show the families that they are welcome into the classroom no matter what their culture is or where they are from. My classroom will be very accepting of all cultures! I also feel it's important for teachers to have lesson plans and assignments based on culture and allowing children to work in groups and show off assignments. Every teacher must recognize their own biases and get those fixed so they can truly be non-biased in the classroom and accept everyone for who they are. All of these things would be helpful for me and the Chinese family.