My Family Traditions: A Class Book and a Potluck Lunch

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Inspire students' creativity, collaboration, and community in this lesson using the bilingual children's book Family Pictures/Cuadros de Familia by Carmen Lomas Garza. After a read-aloud and analysis of this book about a Mexican American family, students write descriptions of the book's pictures and discuss what family traditions are. They then create a class book, which includes their artwork, information about their ancestral countries, descriptions of their own unique family traditions, and family recipes. The final community-building activity is a class potluck where students share both a special food and the class book with their families and peers.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

Family Pictures Class Book: Requirements for Each Page: Students will find this handout very useful as they begin to put together their class book.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Nagel, G.K. (2002). Building cultural understanding and communication: A model in seven situations. Reading Online, 6(4). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/nagel/

• Current standards include practices that enhance an understanding of diversity.
  
  
• An important way to combat prejudice is by knowing one's roots and sharing pride in one's heritage with others.
  
  
• Through critical pedagogy, we learn to communicate things we know and care about with words; we also think and communicate so we can make a difference in the world.

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