Subject: World Languages
Lesson Length: 45 mins - 1 hour
Topic: Expression, Communication, Culture, Tradition, Presentation
Grade Level: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Standards / Framework:
Brief Description: Students will investigate, explain, and reflect on the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the culture studied.
Know Before You Start: Students should be able to express traditions common to their culture.
Hook:
- Ask students:
- “What family traditions do you have?”
- “How can we share our culture or background?”
- “What cultural tradition do you want to explain to others?”
Activity:
- As a class, have students discuss different traditions that come from their background or culture.
- Have students discuss different ways to share or talk about their traditions.
- Using the sample comic as a guide, have students create a comic that describes a tradition of their choice.
Closure:
- Have students share their comics with the class or in small groups.
- Have students explain why they chose the tradition featured in their comic.
- Discuss why it’s important to talk about culture and traditions in a different language.
- Emphasize that learning languages also involves learning about and comparing traditions and cultural norms.
Differentiation:
- Allow students to use the speech-to-text feature.
- Allow students to work in pairs or groups as needed.
- Allow students to use the voiceover feature to read their comics aloud.
- Allow students to use digital dictionaries/translators as appropriate for your class policy.
- Students may find it helpful to draft their descriptions in English first, then the target language, if they find it difficult to create original sentences in the target language.
- Help students identify and define what “culture” might mean, whether related to their family background or the community to which they belong.
- Help students identify images of cultural traditions, e.g., dress, decorations, etc.
- For younger grades, provide books with pictures of some traditional cultural events, dress, etc.
- Allow students to use digital dictionaries/translators as appropriate for your class policy.
Resources:
- Comic to print or display: Comic.
- T-Chart
- Main Idea Web
- Concept Map
- Lined Venn-Diagram
- Venn-Diagram
Suggested Content Packs:
Make a comic about Native American Heritage
Make a comic about Filipino-American Heritage
Make a comic about Hispanic Heritage
Make a comic about Asian Pacific American Heritage
Make a comic about Italian-American Heritage
Make a comic about Shabbat
Suggested Story Starters:
