by Alexia Mavromatis, WAB's Dutch Mother Tongue Language Teacher

The halls of WAB's Elementary School were colored with national flags from nearly 50 countries this week.

Students were taking part in the annual Celebration of Diversity, focused this year on the central idea "Diversity Makes our Community Stronger." The week started with three assemblies of students singing songs, watching videos, and listening to stories about how our differences make us stronger.

In homerooms and during single-subject lessons, we looked deeper into the WAB community to learn each other's stories and appreciate the differences each student brings to their class and wider school community.

Investigations included exploring diversity in a multitude of forms including culture, physical appearance, physical abilities and disabilities, religion, family structures, and socio-economic status. Most importantly, every homeroom celebrated their diversity in a way that was unique and special to their immediate class community.

This is the first of three scheduled Global Awareness events of the school year. In March we will hold our week-long Celebration of Languages, and in May our Global Issues assemblies.

It was fantastic to see so much going on in the Elementary School connected to diversity. We hosted an international short film festival every lunchtime; there was origami during lunchtime in the library; students played rugby on Tiger Field during PE; and the Makerspace held several workshops on diversity.

Families visited classrooms to share their personal stories, songs, food, and crafts. A favorite tradition among the students, each grade also worked with parents and our Parent Link organization to hold a shared lunch with foods of special significance to families from around the world.