Help us in our mission to teach children that differences are good. Find any opportunity you can to educate children to love diversity, to love everyone no matter what they look like, what color their skin is, what their class or status is, and in spite of their medical conditions. Use the word beautiful as much as you can when you talk about “differences.” It will resonate.
For ways we can teach children to love “different” click on the pages below this tab- Books we Recommend, Movies we Recommend, Songs we Recommend, and Videos we Recommend.
Besides these four categories, there are many other methods that we can use to help our children broaden their perspectives of differences:
-Showing or telling stories about how people have overcome diversity and how they have triumphed, is powerful. Stories are a great resource because as you know children love stories.
-You can use nature as an way to explain differences and diversity. For example; Showing our children a garden with different types of flowers and making them realize how much more beautiful the garden looks when it has different kind and different colored flowers.
-You can use art/an activity to illustrate and demonstrate the beauty in differences. For example; You can cut out different shaped and sized human figures and have the kids glue them onto a paper. They can color the background and draw on the figures. Then you can use this as an opportunity to talk about how we are all different, but we are still people, and that is okay.
-Emerging our children to many different cultures and social situations; through play dates, by experiencing different foods, by stepping outside our comfort zone and attending events where our children are exposed to differences.
Note:
-The more and the younger we introduce our kids to a variety of children, the more different will be their norm.
-What happens when we don’t teach our kids about differences? We close the door to getting to know wonderful people and open doors to unpleasant situations. Bullying is more likely to happen, misunderstandings, judgement, and discrimination.
-Words can be so powerful and hurtful. Learning to accept and love differences can help us understand others so that we may make kind choices and use kind words.
-In a world where social media, and entertainment dictate so much of our culture. Remember to open your heart and choose kindness-
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