My main focus for this first term is building relationships with my students. In the first week, we focused a lot on writing our name, we did this by creating bag tags, bookmarks, labels for our tables, book boxes, and students individual cubby holes. This helped me identify the more independent students and those that were still learning to write their names.
Continuing with the focus of building relationships we did a lot of 'about me' work which was a chance for the students to tell their peers and me all about who they are, where they come from and what makes them so special. One of the biggest things I learned was how prominent religion, language, and culture was in their everyday home lives. With a class made up of 9 different countries, it was important for me to normalize that and celebrate the differences in culture. I started doing this by greeting students in their home language, some chose to respond in their home language, some chose to respond in other languages they knew or were interested in. This has become a daily routine for us. I say Morena to the first student and they respond in whatever language they like. I then use their greeting to greet the next student and so on and so forth. As we got more confident we started introducing new languages, we now know how to say good morning in over 10 languages.
From all of this 'about me' work, one of the biggest things I have learned is that many of the children in my class are nervous to embrace their language and culture at school. My goal moving forward is that every child knows where they came from and they are proud of that.
