Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students

For the past few weeks I have been discussing this blog with my cousin, who is an ESL and Spanish teacher in a K-8 school. She has given me a number of good sites - some which are already posted or have been accessed from the State of NJ tutorial (such as www.crede.org). One of the sites she gave me on a list was for an interactive science site, www.exploratorium.edu. It is a really interesting site, but I haven't found an ELL connection yet. Also on this site are links to sites that Exploratorium thinks are "cool." While researching some of these websites, I came across http://www.carts.org/ . This site is for CARTS (Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students) and "is a project of City Lore, a cultural organization dedicated to the documentation, presentation, and preservation of New York City's — America's — living cultural heritage." The site has resources for different cultural lessons and artists-in-residence for NYC schools, from a workshop on making Chinese lanterns to an African folk dance lesson. The group partners with the schools to provide enriching cultural experiences that I think are important to preserve and share with students. The site shares some great ideas, but the best part is an online cultural catalog that has unusual books and items that can be used to expose children to other cultures. Most of the items are things that I have not seen in local bookstores. According to the catalog page, they carry "Multimedia Resources in FOLKLORE, HISTORY, CULTURE, and the ARTS For Integration Across the Diciplines." I think that having some of these materials in a classroom helps non-ELLs understand and accept classmates from other countries.