Day 3

Today I was working with Mrs. T's third kindergarten class. The students were finishing Easter eggs that they had started the previous class. The students were to create stories on their eggs, meaning drawings of spring scenes (such as rabbits and bunnies, chicks and flowers) with cray pa, and then water color over their drawings. While the stories the students were meant to create were supposed to be about spring, not Easter, it was definitely a holiday themed project. 

I believe that there is only one student of a different nationality in the class, though the curriculum doesn't seem to be especially sensitive to others apart from the monoculture. The previous lesson that I had observed, the second grade students were building tribal huts from an African village. The students weren't taught about the tribe's way of life, just that they would be making paper housing similar to theirs. At first I was pleased to see the inclusion of this project, but soon realized that the students weren't being taught anything about this culture, just that their houses look different.

I was also surprised that Mrs. T was even doing the Easter project. I was under the impression that most schools weren't doing holiday projects as much anymore, but only had this assumption and no real reason to believe it, other than from articles we've read in class. The project was made to be just a story board of sorts, where the students draw their own scenes, but they were required to be spring scenes drawn on an egg. In my opinion, it is difficult to justify that this is just a spring project, creating their own "story" (which are all the same) and not an Easter project. Seeing as Easter is the last main holiday before the end of the school year, aside from Mother's Day, I will be interested to see what the approach will be, monoculture or not, for the rest of the semester.