Looking for a fun event that will foster opportunities for muliticultural learning? Cultural Care Au Pair is hosting a totally awesome FREE event this weekend that will provide hands-on learning and cultural experiences for your little ones in Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA.
Cultural Care Au Pair provides affordable and flexible childcare for families of all kinds. With an average cost of just $8/hour per family, an au pair provides 45 hours of care each week – including evenings and weekends. An au pair is actually quite flexible and affordable! If an au pair is something your family has been thinking about, Cultural Care Au Pair could be your answer! You’d be a host family, welcoming your au pair into your family’s schedules and routines. Not only do you get one-on-one loving childcare, but also an opportunity to learn a second language and exposure to another country’s games, songs and cuisine. You can learn more at www.culturalcare.com.
As a reading specialist, I understand the need to encourage our children to appreciate multiculturalism. Although we may not be able to travel the world, we can expose our children to the world through books. One way we foster this multicultural learning is by exposing our children to various cultures through children’s literature. Research shows that reading aloud is the single most important thing that you can do to prepare your child to learn. Since March is National Reading Awareness Month, I couldn’t think of a more perfect time to encourage all of you to carve out just fifteen short minutes of your day to cuddle up with your children and read aloud to them.
There are so many wonderful children’s picture books that help us raise global citizens. If you are looking for some titles to support multicultural learning, take a look at some of these wonderful selections below: (all excerpts by Amazon.com)
Top Multicultural Books for Kids
A South African Night (ages 2-5)
This simply written picture book focuses on the transition from day to night, contrasting the activities of humans in Johannesburg with those of the animals in Kruger National Park after the sun sets.
Everybody Bonjours (ages 3-7)
This delightful tour of Paris begins, “When in Paris, everybody bonjours.” The refrain is repeated as a little girl and her family hear that welcome, “From shores. In stores. On guided tours.” The cheery ink-and-watercolor artwork is stylishly rendered.
All Kinds of Families (ages 3-7)
With irresistible, rollicking rhyme, beloved picture book author Mary Ann Hoberman shows readers that families, large and small, are all around us.
Basket of Bangles (ages 4 and up)
With seed money borrowed from a bank, a young woman and four of her friends in Bangladesh change their lives by starting their own businesses.
Marisol McDonald and the Clash Bash (ages 4-8)
Marisol McDonald is fiercely determined not to match. The character came out of Brown’s own experience growing up in a bicultural home with a North American father and a Peruvian mother and not being sure where she fit in. This title finds Marisol preparing for her birthday party.
One Green Apple (ages 4-8)
This poignant, attractive offering fills a growing need for picture books about contemporary immigrants of Arab descent, without limiting its relevance to a single ethnic group.
Whoever You Are (ages 4-8):
A one-world, “we-are-all-the-same-under-the-skin” message for the very young. “Little one, whoever you are, wherever you are, there are little ones just like you all over the world.”
I Love Saturdays y domingos (ages 5-8)
A little girl recounts the joy of her weekends, Saturdays spent with her Euro-American Grandma and Grandpa and Sundays (los domingos) with Abuelito and Abuelita, her Mexican-American grandparents.
Locomotive (ages 4 – 10)
It is the summer of 1869, and trains, crews, and family are traveling together, riding America’s brand-new transcontinental railroad. These pages come alive with descriptive details of the journey: the sounds, speed, and strength of the mighty locomotives; the work that keeps them moving; and the thrill of travel from plains to mountain to ocean.
Kimchi and Calamari (ages 8-12)
Joseph Calderaro is facing many woes typical of a 14-year-old boy. However, trouble with girls, school, his younger twin sisters, and his parents is complicated by his growing awareness of the gulf between his Korean ethnicity and the Italian heritage of his adoptive family, especially his father.
Brown Girl Dreaming (ages 10 and up)
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post on behalf of Cultural Care Au Pair. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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