Cultural show & tell

Author: Stella Lawson (Nigeria) | Published on 11 December 2025

 

Read what Stella says about this activity:

To encourage intercultural awareness and speaking by allowing learners to describe cultural items or pictures from their homes and traditions.

The day or week before you plan to teach this lesson, you will need to tell the students to bring something to class. They will need to understand what kind of thing to bring, and you might choose to caution them against bringing in anything valuable. If you are working in a context where students do not have many personal belongings, you may adapt the activity so that students can bring a song, dance, story, word or gesture to class as their cultural artifact.

Stage 1: Warm up (pre-teach) 

Ask students: 'What is culture?'

Elicit examples (food, music, fabric, celebrations).

Teacher shows one simple example from their culture.

Stage 2: main activity

1. Students show an object or picture representing their culture.
2. Each student describes it using simple frames:

• This is…
• It comes from…
• We use it when…
• It is important to us because…
• In my culture, we believe that…

3. Peers ask 1–2 questions after each presentation.

Stage 3: Reflection / Follow-up

Students can discuss in pairs,

What was the most memorable object you saw today?

What does it tell us about the culture it comes from?

Optional: Students write one sentence about a classmate’s item.

Notes  Suitable for low-resource classrooms. Students who forget items can draw quick sketches. Works for all ages and all levels. You could change the activity so that students talk about their artifact before revealing it, with the other students guessing what it is.