Teach Cultural Differences to Young Learners

One of the many tasks that an EFL teacher has to face is to promote opportunities for teaching cultural aspects and how important it is to avoid generalizing. We teachers have to deal with a very tight schedule, and many times we fail to add a cultural touch to our lessons. Last week I attended a minicourse at Casa Thomas Jefferson called Cultural Capsules in the Lesson Content by Kátia Falcomer and Marcília Taveira. The presenters quoted Don Snow and how he recommends categorizing cultural aspects we teachers are supposed to know and teach. The aformentioned author claims that belonging to a culture means having shared knowledge of important dates, songs, writers, but it also means having shared views and shared patterns of behaviors. The participants were assigned the task of coming up with a lesson for one of the books we teach at the Casa. My group got Fantastic 2. I have to confess that it was hard to plan with people I'm not very close to, but I was pleased by the results. I'm sharing here the video we used and the powerpoint presentation we had. We brought food from different places, and that boosted the energy in the group. Here are the materials in case you work with this age group ( 9 year old Elementary students) and have a foody lesson coming along.

Breakfast around the World

Target vocabulary Food for breakfast-
Level Elementary
Aim Understand what people eat in three foreigner countries.
Write about food preferences for breakfast
Promote intercultural awareness
Web2.0 Mixbook
Materials Powerpoint, DVD player or computer and internet connection
Preparation Bring some examples of food people eat in different countries

Cultural Differences Food Items Creative Commons

More PowerPoint presentations from Daniela