Multicultural Education Activities For Kids From Little World Wanderers

Looking for multicultural education activities for kids? Little World Wanderers creates lovely lessons to help kids connect with cultures and people from countries all around the world. Read on for more about these beautiful global education units you can explore at home with your children, many of which are even free!

The world is a big place, filled with incredible people, beautiful landscapes, and wonderful stories. As a former military kid, I had the unique opportunity to travel the world and live in other places. I was born in Adana, Turkey, and many of my first memories are impacted by my time overseas. 

Nurturing Our Children’s Interests

When my daughter was five, my husband and I noticed that she showed a unique level of compassion towards others. She had a desire to learn about the places and people of the world. Our family has always been intentional about reading books about others and bringing diversity into our home through literature, toys, and art supplies. 

As her interest in different cultures flourished, we started being more mindful about choosing books that centered around a particular country and doing crafts, seeking out children’s songs, and cooking recipes from that country. We watered the flowers of her cultural intrigue. The focused multicultural activities sprouted into educational and engaging lessons about a particular country and culture, and they became the first seeds of Little World Wanderers. 

While putting pen to paper to write our first homeschooling unit for our daughter, our son was born. Ezra came home through domestic infant adoption after a two-and-a-half-year-long process. We maintain an open adoption with his biological family and have a unique experience of learning about his culture from them. 

Ezra is Mexican, Korean, and Japanese; he has an amazing birth heritage that doesn’t match our family. As white adoptive parents, we knew we had to be intentional about bringing his birth cultures into our lives and helping him maintain a connection to his heritage. 

Exploring Other Cultures From Home With Kids

Intentionally learning about the world with children can feel overwhelming and daunting. It can be hard to know where to begin. Books, food, and music are fun and educational avenues to explore new cultures in engaging ways without leaving home. 

For our family, we first learn about and connect with other cultures through books. We choose a country and find books about that country, preferably written by an author writing in their own voice, meaning the author shares the culture and is from the country they are writing about, writing from their own lived experiences. 

Books offer a powerful connection to others and have the ability to impact children in positive ways. Books showcase the beauty of a place, which we believe is incredibly important when creating positive connections to other cultures. 

Our second favorite way to explore the world from home is through food. Having my kids in the kitchen brings me a lot of joy. They’re also more likely to try something new if they had a hand in preparing the meal. Over the years, trying foods from other countries has allowed our family to make connections between different places and find similarities between cuisines. 

For my own education, culinary cultural exploration has inspired me to learn more about historical connections, immigration, and colonization of different areas over time. As my children get older, I’m hopeful these connections with food will also help solidify harder-to-grasp history and social studies lessons they would otherwise only read about in books. 

Multicultural Education Lessons For Kids

Coming to understand the challenging yet essential responsibility of helping our son connect with his heritage lit a fire in me to share the importance of creating a culture-inclusive home in our adoption and homeschool communities. Writing culture units wasn’t just for our home or close friends. We had a deep desire to share how and why it is important to learn about the cultures of others.

We started sharing Little World Wanderers units on social media and built the Little World Wanderers website for families to download our units. We hoped to give parents an avenue to learn about the world in an authentic and engaging way with their children. Our units center around bringing to life the culture of a country through songs, folk tales, crafts, and recipes. 

Little World Wanderers’ cultural lessons place a strong emphasis on beauty in multicultural education because I believe that multicultural education creates more compassionate humans. As our children grow and learn about the world, understanding our neighbors (near and far) is essential to being part of our community. 

Intentional education about different cultures helps children connect with others in authentic ways. These natural connections help foster a love of people and places that they may not otherwise develop without travel. 

Little World Wanderers lessons encourage children to go beyond surface knowledge of a geographical location and build a bridge of connection to and compassion for new people and places through songs, recipes, and stories. In a world fraught with injustice, multicultural education inspires children to be more empathetic. Cultural connection to people and places often motivates greater compassion. 

We hope that exposure to a place through food, crafts, language, and art, like those in our Little World Wanderers lessons, fosters more connected and compassionate responses from children when they learn of injustice towards other people. With a more robust cultural understanding of others, adults and children alike are more inclined to stand alongside groups of people different from themselves in the face of injustice, hardship, or inequalities.

Parents have the ability to make a multigenerational impact in the world by raising the next generation of responsible global citizens. We believe inspiring a love of other cultures is an important step to achieving this goal and raising culturally curious kids compelled to care and advocate for others. 

Little World Wanderers Multicultural Education Lessons

Little World Wanderers helps parents bring multicultural education into their homes. Each country unit includes a book list, recipes to make with your children, a folktale, songs, and handicrafts related to the country of focus. 

Little World Wanderers’ lessons spark a love of other places in a way that inspires families to intentionally seek out authentic learning about different cultures in their homes. Each unit is designed not as a stand-alone curriculum but a starting point to give families the opportunity to learn about a place together and inspire a desire to continue learning through further exploration beyond the materials in each unit.

We created Little World Wanderers for all families and caregivers of little ones, not just homeschooling families. We don’t have traditional curriculum units. Instead, each unit is designed to be done as a family, woven into your home in a way that works best for you. 

Complete the crafts and give them as gifts. Listen to the children’s songs as you prepare cultural recipes together. Integrate stories into bedtime routines. All children have a natural curiosity to learn about others. Bringing multicultural education into your home is a beautiful way to connect your children to the world and people around them. We believe Little World Wanderers will inspire and empower your family to explore diversity and other cultures from your own home. 

You can access all of our country units on our Little World Wanderers website. You can also find us on Instagram where we share book resources and ideas from other creators passionate about multicultural education. 

About The Author