Tell me about your culture

[Tara.]

As some of you know, I work at a childcare center. Me and my co-teacher have been discussing how we can teach our preschoolers cultural awareness. She seems to think that the only way to teach culture is to base it off of religion. Parents are not too happy with the idea of us teaching their 4 and 5 year olds different religions, to say the least. We are butting heads on how to approach this. I say that we can introduce them to new cultures by the foods we eat, songs we sing, books we read, etc. For some reason I still don't understand - she thinks we can only teach them cultures by celebrating the holidays and discussing their religions (like talking about Jesus during circle time).

So any who, I need some ideas on what to research, my questions for you guys are:
What can you tell me about your culture.
What do you see as your traditions?
Food?
Music?
Holidays?
Anything else?

THANKS!

[Commiseration]

When I was little in grade school, we sometimes learned about different cultures without going into religion. Like this one time they taught us a few spanish words, made some sort of spanish cookie and things of that sort. They did the same for French and taught us "Frère Jacques". Unfortunately that's the only cultures we went in to because that's all the languages my school taught. You can also find books of childrens stories from other cultures around online.

Personally, I'm american and you probably know that culture since you're in colorado. But my heritage is German and Irish, so there's little things from those I have as well. For example, in respect to the Irish you could tell them of the potato famine, celtic knots, and find some fun Irish sayings to teach them. For Germany, you can always just bring out some sauerkraut and lebkuchen, haha. Or have them say "gesundheit" instead of "bless you" when someone sneezes. It translates to "health" so that's not religious either.

Simple things like that. Kids don't need to go too deep into things. As long as it's fun they'll like it. And it doesn't have to include holidays or religions at all...Spaß haben! ("Have fun", in german)