QUESTIONS
- What are some defining features of your culture?
- Why does the author believe that food is so important to understanding culture?
- What kinds of food do you eat at home regularly?
- Why was the author scared that people attending the Multicultural Day wouldn’t like the food?
- “Foreign foods, dances, music and clothes were not seen as different and weird, but were celebrated and admired.” What is something that you celebrate and admire about a different culture?
ACTIVITIES
Recipe Book Fundraiser: Ask your students to think of a meal they enjoy and eat regularly at home. Students can ask whoever prepares that meal to help write the recipe. Bring the recipe to class or add it to a shared document. Collate all the recipes together into a recipe book. Ask students to choose a recipe that they have never tried before and attempt to make it. Students can write reviews for the recipes, provide a difficulty rating, and run a fundraiser by selling the recipe books to raise money in support of a cultural charity.
Imagine: Throughout the Bible, God uses food to perform miracles, and sometimes these miracles were not easily accepted. One example is in the Old Testament’s Exodus 16 when the Lord provides manna to eat. Manna is bread from heaven provided for the Israelites while they traverse the desert and follow Moses, who is led by God. The Israelites have never seen manna before. Using your imagination, write a diary entry of what one of the Israelites might have felt at seeing the manna, or by a traveller wandering past and watching the Israelites eat the manna. Perhaps you can think about a time when you encountered a food you haven’t seen before or food from a different culture to help you get started.
As an extension activity read the Gospel of John 6:41-58. Can you see any connections between Exodus 16 and John 6:41-58? Was the food God wanted to provide readily accepted?
Saintly Research: Blessed Carlo Acutis was born in 1991 and died in 2006. As a 15-year-old, Carlo had a love of the Eucharist (the bread of life) and had a particular interest in Eucharistic miracles. He also loved video games and computer programming and used these interests to build a website that catalogued Eucharistic miracles from across the world to share with people from all languages and cultures. Research Blessed Carlo Acutis and his catalogue of Eucharistic miracles.
FOR YOUNGER STUDENTS
Classroom Museum: Ask students to go home and talk to their family, a close friend or community member about their culture. Ask students to bring an object from home that represents their culture to share with their classmates. Place the objects around the room. As a class, walk to each object. Ask the owner to show their object and tell the class about what it is, and why it means something to them, their family or their culture. When the class tour has finished, bring the students back into a conversation circle. Give the students time at the end to freely wander the classroom museum, to look at and draw some of the objects their classmates have shared with them.