Room 5 Cultural Celebration!

By Shona Mckenzie | Posted: Sunday December 4, 2022

In Room 5 we have been learning and celebrating the different cultures in our classroom.

Each week we are learning about a new culture. Our students are teaching us their language, traditions, food, animals and general life in their home country.

Our culture teachers were all students from our class who were either born in a different country, or their family was, or they can speak a different language. Our teachers were, Kanon Taki  (Japan), Zhibang Cheng (China), Ben King and Andrew Moriarty (England), Ben Ha (Korea), and Jared Borea and Daniel Wordsworth (South Africa). 

We did this to learn more about the places and cultures that our peers grew up with. Learning about their customs and traditions can help us get closer to them and make them feel more included. It is also just so interesting!

With Kanon (Miss Taki), we learnt how to count in Japanese as well as introducing ourselves and learning about food and animals. We also got to learn a really cool Japanese game, similar to Chess.

Daniel and Jared taught us about South Africa, we learnt slang words and we even completed a statistics investigation during maths about the languages spoken in South Africa. They have a great South African hand shake too!

Zhibang taught us about China. He explained what life was like living in China during the COVID lockdown. It was amazing to hear the differences between going to school in China and New Zealand. We loved hearing about the amazing food Zhibang and his family cook! 

Ben and Andrew taught us about the UK. We loved learning about the food and can't wait to have a full English breakfast together. It was also interesting learning about the Royals and how important they are in the UK. We enjoyed learning about their mythical creatures and the slang used over there. 

Finally, we have had lessons about Korea from Ben Ha. He has taught us about the alphabet, introducing ourselves, a brief over view of the language and an insight into life in Korea and its food.  

We are really excited to have our cultural celebration that the students from our class have organised. On this day we will be playing games we now know from each culture, cooking and sharing food and practicing the language we have learnt. 

We think it is important to learn about other cultures and this go beyond just the classroom. With the knowledge that we have learned it will help us if we go on holidays, or if we come across someone who is from one of the places that we have researched or speaks one of the languages.

Overall it has been a really fun and interesting experience! 

Jessica Wallwork