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Canada's Daycares
Meeting the Needs of a Multicultural Society By Neilia Sherman
Mary Anne Santiago understands the need for multicultural awareness in daycare, as both a parent of biracial children who attend daycare and through her job at Topcliff Community Daycare Centre in Toronto, Ontario. She has a diploma in early childhood education and feels that Canadian daycare centres are making an effort to address the needs of multicultural communities such as the one in which she lives and works. "Our daycare centre recognizes all of the holidays and festivals of the children registered in the daycare," she says. "Our bulletin boards are filled with multicultural photos and art."
Santiago sees parental input as being extremely important. "I have coordinated a multicultural pot luck dinner and social for children and parents where parents were asked to cook a dish that is native to their home country that they will share with all in attendance," she says. "Children were encouraged to wear traditional clothing from their native country and were involved in a cultural fashion show."
In choosing daycare for her own children, who are of African-Canadian and Filipino heritage, Santiago wanted to make sure that the staff was culturally sensitive and culturally representative of the community in which she lived. She has been pleased with the programming and the fact that the staff at her children's daycare does celebrate diversity.
Szereszewski has a number of ideas for programs that will teach children in daycare to celebrate diversity. Here are just a few:
- Listen to music, and sing songs in a variety of languages and from different countries.
- Translate children's names into different languages.
- Read books that show people and families of different cultures, and learn and play games from around the world.
- Explore foods from other cultures by cutting out pictures and making a collage, putting together a recipe book of each family's favourite recipe or having diverse foods and snacks as part of the regular menu.