World Cultures Club Days 2 and 3: Culture Maps and Folktales

The last two weeks at Culture Club, I've been trying to get students to think about their own culture.  First, they thought about their zone or town.  The next week, they thought about Ethiopia as a culture.  In order to do this, I had students create what I called a "Culture Map," or a visual representation of their culture loosely based on a bubble map.

Here was my example:

It had the added bonus of teaching students a little bit about Seattle culture and how it was more than just generic American culture.  I divided the map into four corners - Food, Famous People, Landmarks, and Symbols.  I hope it's obvious which corner is which.  I got a reaction when I mentioned that Bruce Lee claimed Seattle as his home.  He's popular here because for some reason Ethiopians love watching martial arts films.  Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain sailed over their heads, though.

The results of their own maps varied.  Many students complained that they couldn't draw.  Academic culture here, as well as Ethiopian culture in general, is not too concerned with the arts.  I told them that it didn't matter how well they could draw, but to draw something.  Still, they were hesitant, so I told them they could use words but they HAD to be English words.  Still, my wonderful counterpart did a great job of combining both.  Here's his example of Gurage culture:

My counterpart, Elfineh, divided his map into food, holidays, crops and traditional ceremonies.  And the result is, a cool little map of Gurage culture including a Meskel fire (left - with the cross) and two happy newlyweds dancing (right).  I think that's a bowl of kitfo in the upper right hand corner, but I can't be sure.  I was just happy Elfineh was participating.

The following week, I introduced students to the concept of folktales.  I explained that every culture has stories that they share with their children, even Ethiopia.  But it had been my experience that many Ethiopians didn't know their own folk tales.

That's where your Better World Books came in.

I used "The Perfect Orange" as a read aloud to model what an Ethiopian story looked like, and checked for comprehension by asking students to make predictions as I read, or to summarize what had already happened.  By the end of it, all students showed that they understood the tale.  It helped that many of the words used were Amharic words - like injera, "Ato Jib" (Mr. Hyena), and shamma.  The main character even had a common Ethiopian name - Tsahai - that students immediately recognized.  Comparing to the western stories I've read to the fifth and sixth grade students at Belay's school (Where the Wild Things Are and the Lorax), I was reminded how remarkably easy it is for students to comprehend a story when they already have the background knowledge.  As a teacher, this has only further reinforced in me the importance of building background knowledge when I share more Western stories with the students.

After the read-aloud, students were given one of two Ethiopian folktales.  One I had photocopied from "Fire on the Mountain" (thanks, Mom!) and the other I'd taken from "The Lion's Whiskers" (the collection of stories, not the illustrated version).  Students were tasked with reading the story, familiarizing themselves with it, then telling it to a partner who had not read the story.  This practiced reading comprehension as well as oral English and retelling skills, although I did say if it became too difficult to retell in English they could explain it in Amharic, because that still showed they understood the English text.  They worked so well together I had to go about and take pictures.  I was also impressed to see mixed-gender groupings.  Here are my students sharing their folktales with each other.

Hooray for teamwork!  I was happy to see my students working well together.  Next week is "Ferenge Christmas Week," so I'll be explaining how Americans (in particular) and other Westerners celebrate the holiday on December 25th.  I plan on making snowflakes and paper chains.  Any other craft project suggestions are more than welcome, as well as anything you think I should share.

In fact, if you have any Christmas traditions you have with your family, please send me a note.  I can compile them into a handout for students so they can see examples of Western holiday traditions.  Ethiopians also celebrate Christmas, or the day of Christ's birth.  They call it "Genna" and it is celebrated on January 6th every year, the same day as the Orthodox calendar.

Yet another way "Do They Know Its Christmas" got Ethiopia all wrong. ;)

Cheers and happy holidays, everyone!  Please post those Christmas traditions for me before next Monday!

World Cultures Club Day 1: Namebows and Defining Culture

Seventeen students were registered for World Cultures Club on Monday.  Twenty-one students showed up, with more at the door thirty minutes later whom I didn't admit.  Punctuality is important to me and in my culture, I explained, and if they wanted to take part in our activities they must be on time.  It was an excellent example for everyone present and they all nodded vehemently.

I started the class with the played-out "Find Someone Who..." bingo activity.  The Ethiopian students had never done anything like it before, though, and even when the first student managed to get all twenty-five signatures, the others wanted to continue to mingle and finish their sheets.  When I had finally herded them back inside the ELIC, I debriefed the activity, asked who had signed for what.  The squares had been cultural factoids, like "Someone born outside of Hossana," "Someone who speaks three or more languages," and "Someone who is Orthodox" etc.  We discussed the definition of culture and made two flip charts (one per table) on what culture means.  To review this next session, I'm going to have each table create their own poster together of what culture is.

Afterwards, we did another fun activity I actually got off of my Pinterest Account (see?  It's not just a time-waster!) called "Namebows."

Don't judge my adjectives.  Were I in America, I would never model with the word "Nice," but in Ethiopia they're still grasping the language and I wanted to use adjectives I was sure they knew.  My two that I was taking a risk on was "Resourceful" and "Idealistic."

At first, the students understood the concept that each word had to begin with the letter in their name.  What they weren't quite grasping was the idea that it had to be adjectives.  I had all sorts of interesting words, like "Zinc" for Z (from a natural sciences major, no less) or "General," for G - that was a common one.  But with some tweaking, reiterating, and using gobez student examples, I was able to help them make their namebows.

I had hoped the students would cut their own cloud out, but they preferred not to, so many of them looked like this:

Still, they seemed happy enough with them.  And I was so proud, I took them all outside to get a photo of all of us holding our namebows to commemorate the first session of World Cultures Club.

I have one more photo with me with the students.  But my internet's not cooperating or letting me upload, so this one without me will have to do.  After all, it's about the kids anyway, not me, right?

Next time on Ferengi No Habesha?  An update on my read-aloud program!  See you then!