Students thinking globally

By COURTNEY CAIRNS PASTOR
cpastor@tampatrib.com
Published: November 25, 2009

Staff photo by SCOTT ISKOWITZ Carson Swope, hands out cheese empanadas Thursday to students during multi-cultural day. Students at Independent Day School in Tampa learn about different cultures of the Americas by eating different ethnic foods and watching salsa dancers.

CARROLLWOOD - Sixth-grader Megan McBride's hair was yellow, her bow was red and her sweater was green, colors perfectly reflected in Suriname's flag.

The South American country wouldn't be familiar territory to most middle school students, but Megan, 11, immersed herself in it for Independent Day School's multicultural day.

Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders explored the Americas for a few months, delving into the different countries and recently sharing what they learned with the private school's elementary students.

Multicultural day is an annual event, said Betty George, Independent Day's middle school director. It began with students sharing their cultural backgrounds and expanded to encompass the world as the school earned its International Baccalaureate designation. The globally minded program pushes teachers to link different academic subjects and emphasize how they apply to the real world.

Each year, the middle school takes a continent and assigns students to research the countries. Elementary students visit and sit in on student presentations to learn what their older peers discovered.

Seventh- and eighth-grade classes produced power-point presentations and created activities on their countries.

The Chihuahua comes from Mexico, seventh-grader Jenny Astell told a group of second-graders who came to hear her lesson.

"Can you guys act like Chihuahuas?" she asked the children, who crawled onto their hands and knees and began to bark.

She talked to them about the peso, the Mexican flag and a popular game similar to tag and ended her presentation by passing out drawings of a Chihuahua and the country's flag that the children could color.

In an adjacent building, sixth-graders put the final touches on recipes reflecting countries they had chosen for the Multicultural Cafe. Students in Odette Figueruelo's Spanish class chose a country in Central or South America and researched the origins of popular foods while they studied their country.

Teachers wanted them to discover how cultural influences could spread among countries, and how one country could consist of several ethnicities.

"It was very interesting for us to learn from them," Figueruelo said.

Megan wore Suriname's flag around her neck and carried small cups of chicken curry for younger students to sample.

She had researched the recipe online and learned to make it. Suriname residents speak more than 15 languages, she said, and the curry came from Indian immigrants to the country.

Students dined on the curry, empanadas, arepas and other dishes, surrounded by flags of various countries. Four boys and four girls took to the stage to entertain the group with salsa dancing.

Though the day's lessons were directed at the elementary school, George said the older students benefited as well.

"It's a way for our children to do the highest level of learning, and that is teaching themselves," George said.

Reporter Courtney Cairns Pastor can be reached at (727) 451-2343.

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