One Class at a Time: Celebrating cultural traditions virtually

PEKIN (25News Now) - It’s that time of the week where we surprise a local teacher with a $1,000 grant.

This lucky teacher takes students outside of the classroom virtually to learn about different cultures.

One teacher at Scott Altman Primary School in Pekin takes her students all around the world.

“A lot of the things we do in here, I like to do interactive and I like to make meaningful activities that will relate to the children’s lives, and just learned about different cultures, and why Christmas is celebrated differently around the world,” said Sarah Luft, 1st grade teacher at Scott Altman Primary.

Why let living in one place limit you from seeing the rest of the world?

“Well and living in the middle of Illinois, you don’t get a lot of exposure to other cultures necessarily,” Luft said.

And students get to take home souvenirs from their trips to different countries.

“We went to Australia, and so in Australia it’s summer-time during Christmas, so the kids collected seashells. When we went to China, they collected little souvenir fans,” Luft said.

We stopped by Mrs. Luft’s classroom right before St. Patrick’s Day to give her a lucky souvenir for the holiday.

Normally, parents donations help fund the ‘holidays around the world’, so this money will help give her additional support.

“We are really big on technology integretion so this will definitely go towards possibly getting some more robots. We use B-bots and Ozo-bots a lot in our classroom. So getting the kids that hands-on interactive STEM learning, that will definitely go towards that.” said Luft.

“I’m Mrs. Luft and we want to say thank you to 25 News and CEFCU!”

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