I sent the questions to my sister who is a primary school teacher and she provided some great responses, which I've shared below. It would be good to see any other responses you've had.
- I teach year one and the school is located in a large village on the outskirts of a council estate.
- We teach children about life in other countries by comparing and contrasting them to our own country in Geography lessons and also through literacy e.g. a book called Handa's suprise is based in Kenya. We explored where Kenya was, what the weather is like there, how people's lifestyles are different and tasted exotic fruits from other countries. We have links with a school in Africa called Highfields and a person who runs the school comes to take assemblies and tell us about life over there.
- We don't have to teach a set number of lessons about cultural diversity but we do celebrate differences mainly through assemblies, PSHE and circle time.
- The challenges we face are that there are very few ethnic minorities in our school.
- We use big books, interactive whiteboards, interactive stories, artefacts from different cultures, people coming in to talk to us, music and dance.
- cbeebies stories are very culturally diverse, interactive big books.
- I really like the idea of the programme for schools - the children would really enjoy finding out about different cultures.
- What would affect whether we used it in schools? The cost of the product, how many different cultures it explored, whether it had different levels of difficulty for the different age ranges, if it had teaching notes with it with worksheets or activities based around the programme, interactive quizzes, printouts available.
- Maybe linking it with texts and themes taught at the different age ranges in the national curriculum, e.g. Handa's surprise reception/ks1, egyptians KS2.
