Celebrating Differences in the Quad Cities!!

The purpose of this WebQuest is to highlight the diversity and differences of Quad Citizens and to celebrate those differences. Even though the Quad Cities has a predominantly caucasian population, there is also a rich and diverse cultural representation within the area. Here's a video created by the Quad City Chamber of Commerce demonstrating a small fraction of the diversity that the QC area has to offer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdlKSE9Bvc

Open classroom discussion:

What do you think of when you hear the words difference and diversity?

• Difference - a point or way in which people or things are not the same.
• Diversity - the inclusion of different types of people (such as people of different cultures) in a group.

Think of a time that you may have felt different from your peers: does your family enjoy a unique type of food? Can you speak a language that none of your friends can? Do you have an uncommon pet? (Turn and talk to your elbow-partner about things that make you unique)

What do you think this class would be like if everyone in here was exactly the same? 

Why do you think it's so important to have different kinds of people in our classroom community?

• Community - a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.

We will read you all a book called Kindness is Cooler, Mrs. Ruler so we can stress the importance of kindness in our lives.

After reading the book, let's discuss some parts of the book.

1) What effect did Anaya and Tawana's acts of kindness have?

2) In the lunchroom with the situation between Connor and David, how did kindness that was suggested by Pablo affect the situation?

3) Why did Mrs. Ruler call David's act of kindness the best?

4) What are some things that you all could do for acts of kindness?

We want to try the "act of kindness" activity that we saw in the book. Let's see if we can reach the same goal of 100 acts of kindness by the end of the week to match Mrs. Ruler's class score. We want you to keep a journal to record your acts of kindness, how it made you feel when you did it, and how it made another person feel. At the end of the week, you all will write a short reflection about how your week of kindness made you feel. If we can reach 100 acts of kindness this week, we will give the class a surprise.

Ok, it's time for an activity.

ACTIVITY TIME!!!

We're going to create our own classroom diversity map. 

1. Watch YouTube video to start 
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ISsSwxn8NY

    

2. Everybody take about 5 minutes to brainstorm a few characteristics about yourself or your family that makes you different or unique from some of your classmates.
3. After the five minutes of brainstorming by yourself, conduct one interview with a classmate to find out how they are different from you using some of the ideas in the YouTube video (musical interests, talents they have, hobbies, family foods, family culture, etc.). I want you to record your findings and turn them into me. While you're conducting the interview, keep thinking about how you want to represent your own uniqueness.
4. Once everyone has finished interviews, I will exchange a puzzle piece for your interview results. I want everyone to take about 15 minutes to decorate your puzzle piece with your unique and special traits that you decided on. Be as creative as you'd like! 
5. After everyone has decorated their puzzle piece, I want everyone to bring your pieces to the center table and we are going to put the puzzle together.
6. When the puzzle is complete, I will tape the pieces together so I can post it on the wall for the class to see.
7. After the classroom diversity map puzzle is completed and posted, I want to have a classroom discussion about some of the cool things they learned about any of their classmates during this activity and reflect on how important it is to have a diverse group of people in our daily lives. Can anyone think of a time where NOT having diversity would be more beneficial than having it? 

I want to tie everything we learned about in this lesson in a short writing assignment. On a separate piece of paper, I would like the class to write a couple paragraphs telling me what diversity is and if you feel that having diversity is important and why. Please give specific reasons and try to steer clear of just saying something like, "it's just good."

Throughout this week, we will celebrate three different cultural groups. There are so many more cultures than the ones we are going to discuss, so I encourage each of you to learn as much as you can this week about your own unique family culture and maybe a little bit about the cultures of your friends and classmates. The fact that we're all different should create a feeling of curiosity in each of us to want to know more about others who are unlike yourselves. This curiosity is completely natural and should be a factor in bringing us all together to celebrate every person's unique abilities, experiences, family heritage, and all other traits that make us who we are. The cool thing is that the more we find out about people who we think are different than us, the more we see numerous similarities. You may realize that you have something in common with another person or group of people that you were completely unaware of. Just to get all of you thinking, at the end of this unit, we are going to do a class project that we will display in the hallway outside of class. We are going to take a large banner and create a mural about diversity, kindness, and acceptance using information we gain this week. So, I want all of you to keep that in mind throughout the week and start thinking about how you want to express this topic on a mural that will represent this class. It's going to be a fun week!