At a friend’s house
At your friend’s house the rules and the food are quite different from yours.
What do you do?
Life Skills · Practice · Grades 3 to 5
Chapter 8: Community
Different is not wrong. It is just different.
Different is not wrong. It is just different.
2 situations to decide. There is often more than one good answer: pick one and see what happens.
At a friend’s house
What do you do?
After the break
What do you do?
Families are different in all sorts of ways. Who lives in the house, what they eat, what they celebrate, what languages they speak, how much money there is.
Whatever happens in your house feels like the ordinary way. Everybody feels that about their own.
"What do you do at your house?" is a good question. "That is weird" is not.
Some families have much more than others. Talking about what you have is one of the fastest ways to make somebody feel bad.
Question 1 of 1
A friend does something differently at home. What is a good response?
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Why: "What is it like?" gets a story. "Why do you do that?" gets a defense.
This lands best through curiosity rather than a lesson about tolerance. Children are naturally interested in how other houses work if nobody has taught them to rank the answers.
The money point is the one children handle worst and adults address least. Casual talk about vacations and possessions is a common source of quiet exclusion in a classroom.
How adults describe other families in front of children — the ones with different arrangements, different food, less money — is copied almost exactly.