It’s extremely easy for people to only stay concerned with their culture as they grow. As home educators, we truly begin to understand the importance of ensuring the fundamental knowledge base of our children is well considered in every direction. Home educators, while providing a steller and well-explored syllabus of home education will always cater to a child’s needs, there are also the excellent opportunities to delve deep into topics that you think will benefit your child. In other words, there is a degree of flexibility.
Exposing your children to new cultures can be one of the most important things you do. While they may not use the most advanced points of algebra in their lifetimes unless entering a field in which this is important, they will always, always be influenced in some way by cultural developments, history, and the beauty of present diversity. In addition, being culturally diverse helps our children complete the great commission that Jesus has commanded of us as Christians. Exposing our children to other cultures helps us to make disciples of all nations.
Exposing your children to new cultures, in a manner that is both celebratory and enlightening can be extremely nourishing for a child. Like anything, you can do this extremely well if you have the best intentions at the outset. Consider our advice:
Festivals
When deciding to experience new cultures, sometimes you need a common purpose to experience in order to kickstart that interest in your child. If you decide to play it wisely, you might realize that festivals are the perfect time to incorporate a lesson for your child, as celebrating culture is often the first true step to learning about culture. For example, learning about Venice near carnival time each year, or learning about Indian culture through the fundamental and anchoring festival of Diwali could help your child not only gain vital, colorful and memorable knowledge about the culture you are exploring together but might help you experience this with greater animation and joy. The timing of these festivals can often provoke a natural timeline of getting to the bottom of the reasons of celebration.
Also, festivals are great places for the assorted celebrations of that culture. For example, dance, food, dress, music, and social comforts are all wrapped into the scope of a festival, meaning it can act as a great showpiece for your family to focus on, helping your child build a more cohesive idea of the when, why, how, where, who, and most certainly the what.
Vacations
Vacations can be a great method of exposing your children to new cultures if you let it. Children often ignore and can become distracted by the many lessons being taught to them if it’s not a pressing reality they might have to face. For that reason, taking a vacation to foreign shores could help them not only see the country in picture books or on television, but travel there, and watch you interact with its flow of life.
Of course, the festival culture previously discussed here can do wonders for this flow of beautiful life, but it’s also important to consider how you might integrate the living situation with their education. Thankfully, searching for a ‘house for rent near me’ might help you sustain a semi-regular living situation in a culture, helping you explore it more thoroughly. This might be extremely important to you if you hope to introduce your child more intimately to their ethnic roots, or meeting family.
Be sure to vacation to places you might not have done, and always decide to change things up. Thankfully, a small village in France being visited might be just as important a method of understanding the flow of general French life as staying in the midst of Paris would be, perhaps more so as often the previous generations flow and ideals are held for longer in these gorgeous rural environments. This can help you experience life in somewhat of a preserved sense, and heading to local museums or simply attending events can help you and your child come together to enjoy the history, art, celebration and current beauty of the culture you find yourselves in.
Museums
Unfortunately, museums are often lacking the deep respect they should be given, especially for those young ones who might find it relatively tiring or even dull to read plenty of exhibits. Museums are fantastic places of preservation and history, and should be treated with nothing but admiration and respect. A deep, thorough visit to your local museum might be a better experience for your child than 20 history lessons at their school, because seeing artifacts up close, curated by historical passions are sometimes some of the most effective and educational efforts you could ever bestow upon your child.
Most museums take the education of youth very seriously indeed. As such, they will often put on important programs to potentially help your child become introduced to new topics, and to demonstrate them in the best and most compelling manner possible. Museums are often subsidized by the government completely, so aside from perhaps a small ticket for dedicated shows and a customary donation, it can be more than possible to help your child prosper with a real kinaesthetic or visual educational platform such as this, and should be used by any parent hoping to give their child a real love for education.
All of this is great of course, but we mustn’t forget that a visit to the museum is also a fantastic day out for the family, and can help you bond. To us, that sounds like a perfect use of your time.
Cohesive Lessons Plans
A cohesive lesson plan can be important when exposing your children to new cultures. For example, it might be that taking related subjects together can help you spawn a natural interest for your child, and introduce different topics seamlessly. For example, a study of cooking and the history of chocolate will always bring you back to Aztec culture, and this can be a long study all by itself.
If there is a culture, it will likely have its own relatable and fascinating foodstuff you could study. Cultural impacts on architecture, music, theatre, and many other forms of art can also form a fantastic natural development from topic to topic, and so when designing a set of topics that you might like to teach your child, it’s very likely that enabling them to experience all of this can help the interrelated information become absorbed more reliably.
If you’re a home educator or teaching your children in their spare time, it can also be worthwhile to frame education in this manner as it helps you remember all of the constituent elements, and is a much more personally entertaining way to teach. Of course, sometimes you might be limited by the specific syllabus you need to take into account, but often doing this can be a wonderful and extremely important consideration to make.
Friends
Of course, forcing your child to become friends with someone just because of their ethnicity is very toxic, strange, and could be considered a functionally racist thing to do, as you’d be reducing a child and their family down to their ethnic group and not who they are. However, there’s absolutely no shame if your child happens to be friends with someone from a different background, or perhaps does at some point in the future to encourage them to ask to learn more about it.
For example, let’s say your child’s friend is part of religion that celebrates a festival you do not. It can be worthwhile to politely ask the parents of that child for more information about it, to help them gain a first hand account of the culture from a loving source. Most people worth being friends with will gladly give you a run down on the history and significance of the festival in their lives, and this can inspire your child. Just remember that many personal and religious matters can be private to some people, so it’s important to never push past a simple polite request of good faith, as long as you respect their response.
With these simple tips, exposing your child to new cultures is sure to become a very important and healthy activity you try to help your child achieve.
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Tiffany
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