Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the Classroom

Every day during circle time, regardless of the topic of conversation, someone always brings up their family!  3-year-olds love to share about their Mommies, Daddies, and siblings.  So why not explore families?  We jumped right in by talking about who is in their family and I gave each child a picture of their family.  Most children talked about how much they love their Mommies and many mentioned the number of people they had in their family.  That prompted a class tally to show how many each of us had in our families.    

I asked the children if our class was also a family and the immediate response was “No, we don’t look alike and we don’t live together.”  I asked, “Do you look like your Mommies, Daddies and brothers and sisters?”  We all agreed that some families do look alike and that also in our classroom, some of us resemble each other too.  I posed, “How do we look different in this classroom?”  Kaylee announced, “My skin is darker than Jakey’s.”  This comment sparked a long conversation about skin color, hair color, eye color, height and even the clothes and shoes we wear are all different.  We decided to see how many different skin tones we had in our classroom.  Each child picked which color paper their skin resembled and then traced their hand and we cut it out.  The children were delighted to see how many skin tones we had just in our class of 14 children!  

This topic emerged naturally within our conversations and during the children’s play and we continued to discuss the differences between all of us, not just how we look but also what we celebrate - Norooz, Chinese New Year, Christmas, Diwali, Ramadan and of course birthdays! We also spent time talking about how differently we play, how different our emotions are, how we all eat different foods, how some of us have 2 dads and some of have grandmothers living with us, how some of us are good at jumping and other are good at writing, how some friends don’t talk much and then also the most important…what each child does best!