How to explore history and culture with young children

By G8 Education team on 6 October 2020

Learning

Here in Australia, we are blessed to call this country home to a diverse group of people from different backgrounds and cultures. This diversity influences our lives in many positive ways, from the food we eat and languages we speak, through to the artistic pursuits that we engage in.

Within our centres, we believe in the importance of embracing this diversity in our curriculum wherever possible. Recently, one of our centres participated in a learning experience on the history and culture of homes!

Why not check out the steps of this activity, and try them at home?

Home painting

The activity started off with each child painting a picture of their homes. This simple experience then led to a thoughtful, in-depth conversation around the rituals that create our home culture. The children also explored new languages, which we observed a positive response to as we built on their interests and engagement in this learning.

Home building

The children’s learning was further engaged by supporting them to design, plan and build their own building or home in a small group. This provided them with the opportunity to embrace a range of dispositions as they discovered, created, improvised, and imagined, whilst challenging their ideas, thinking and building new understandings in a small group setting.

When the children were in the yard playing, they brought their thoughts and ideas through spontaneity, which led to building a house from pavers. This instinctive experience encouraged shared thinking and collaborative learning in an environment that fostered their journey to understand history and culture.

Benefits of learning about history and culture in homes

Through learning of the history of buildings and homes, the children were able to:

Apply real life to their identity
Understand and celebrate the benefits of diversity
Honour their peers’ differences
Reflect on creative interests
Strengthen their coordination skills
Build their social and teamwork skills

Did you know? Most of our learning experiences in centres are led by the interests of the children in our care as well as through a collaborative effort with our families. If you would like to share something interesting about your culture and home life, we would love to learn more and extend on this in our teachings too. As such, we encourage all our families to initiate discussions with our Educators on history and culture, so we can brainstorm ways to bring this into the classroom.

Have you engaged in discussions about history or culture with your little one?