At Stanley Green First School our Future Stars project aimed to give families from ethnic and cultural minority groups a closer involvement with the school. With support from DEED the staff of the school wanted to plan something that would grow from what these families might like to offer. The idea we came up with was to organise a family week during which everyone would be invited to bring pictures into school about their family life. This produced lots of interesting pictures about things like clubs, outings, family activities, churches etc. It also gave us an opportunity to raise the profile of those children from minority groups because their contributions were of special interest arising as they did out of different cultural backgrounds. They were also connected in a vivid way to life in other countries. In response to personal invitations several of the parents were kind enough to come into school and talk about their countries of origin and to answer the children’s questions about all sorts of things e.g. festivals, food, costume, religion, schools, furniture, chopsticks etc.

For us it is important not to see the project in isolation but as a step towards putting multiculturalism into the curriculum in ways that benefit the school community as a whole.

The children were very interested to hear about Chinese customs especially about fireworks and dragons.
Several people wrote things in different languages for us to display.
	During the family week the staff worked hard to create multicultural displays. For example Yr 3 learned about Islamic patterns based on geometrical shapes and about the symmetry and detailed designs in buildings such as mosques and tombs. In creating their own patterns the children were able to make good use of computer applications.