One of my favorite aspects of public education.

The diversity at Turner's school is remarkable, and one of our favorite aspects of his Cragin school experience. Andy and I have spent nearly all, okay all, of our public education surrounded by teachers, other students, administrative faculty, and/or other workers at the school that shared our race and had cultural practices more like our families' than not. At Turner's school he remains a member of the white majority, but he has the luxury of a range of racial identities and diverse cultural traditions from which to experience the world and learn.

Cragin's final school event happened when Nanny, Pa Pa, and Aunt Amy were here for my graduation. Perfect timing. In preparation for the culture festival, each classroom selected (or was assigned, not sure which) a culture (not a country) to study. Students were exposed to historical texts, folklore, traditional music or musical ceremonies, foods, art, and guest speakers (when available). Each classroom spent weeks reading about the selected culture and they were expected to reproduce more than a few cultural practices of art, music, food, and/or horticulture. The Rainbow Room studied Mexican culture. Turner doubled his Spanish vocabulary and brought home some great stories in the folklore tradition. He learned a traditional Mexican dance and performed two songs sung in Spanish at an assembly the night of the culture festival, captured in the video below. Each classroom provided an authentic food associated with their chosen culture and displayed all the children's projects during the learning unit.

Turner showed us first, with such pride, his bark art. The medium is bark and the tool is pastels. We'll be framing this one for our new house.

Next, he showed us his fish picture, which is related to los pescaditos, one of the songs kindergarteners performed at the assembly.

He posed first, then told us the story about the little fish. In his aquatic scene, he included a squid, an octopus, two swordfish fighting (the black in the middle), a sea horse, a star fish on a rock ("like the one me and Kilan saw in Mexico, though this one is five armed and not one hundred armed like the Mexico one"), and a fish we can't remember its name ("you know, the one we saw on Artic Tale that has the horn that comes up out of the water so that he can test the temperature of the air").

Turner performed some music for us, showing off all that he'd learned in trio this year, and then we headed off to the assembly.

Look how pimp he is with his hand low on Margot's hip (she's a Catalina preschool friend).

Margot's bark art picture.

In addition to some sweet smelling food and great music, we received leis and other festive attire.