"i is for indian" apparently.

[DuffyFluckling]

I gritted my teeth when dd's nursery did 'jungle week' and made lions and giraffes (grr - lions and giraffes live ON THE SAVANNAH, not in the jungle).

But now she has come home with a lovely, gluey, sparkley feathered head dress because letter of the week is i, and "i is for indian".

I have decided that I like the nursery because it is a safe and gentle place for her. I am a far bigger influence on her life than they are. I don't love it but I can live with it.

What would other mners think?

My dd did a whole thing about "red" indians at school recently. They made costumes, hats with feathers, and a totem pole. She is 5. I will explain to her about native americans at some point in the future, but in the meantime I cannot be doing with total PCness.

I have enough trouble as she believes that anyone with brown skin comes from Africa or India. Trouble is, her school is near Nato. Her class mates really DO come from Africa and India and a host of other nations (along with a few indiginous Belgians). It doesn't make explanations very easy....

my two sons are both asian and native american mix (3 and 5 mths) there are much worse things they can be called than indian. i dont think there was any harm in this. although a boy at my soons play group did ask why my eldest sons skin was brown and my youngest sons wasnt.i decided not to go into the whole mixed race thing and just told my son to tell the boy that he was chocolate like daddy and his brother was coffee like mummy(what else could i say)

Are you sure they are not just using a bit of the NATO phonetic alpabet? like this

It's just that I use it. I know I used to work in the airline industry, but I knew it all beforehand.

I is for India

/i/ is for Indian is technically (if not politically) correct but /i/ is for ice cream is wrong I'm afraid.

Maybe they should have done 'I' is for Inuit rhen ?

I think where they went wrong was making feathered head dresses for Indians

why is i for ice cream wrong?

Ice cream starts with the "ie" phoneme not the "i" when teaching reading and writing.

it's preschool though
they arent tewaching reading and writing just recognising letters
2 yr old dd has an abc book and it has i is for ice cream

If they are taught i is for ice cream then when they start to read and write they will have established misconceptions.
The guidance is that pre schools should teach the phonemes but not link them to the actual letter recognition. There are lots of books that are published for young children that are misleading I'm afraid.

Well if it was the phonetic alphabelt J would be Juliet.

I think we should just let children be children.

lions and giraffes do live on the savannah and not the jungle - I think this is being more accurate.

sorry misread your post

Is letting children be children based on giving them completely innacurate information, then?

Duffy - I would be wincing at the sparkley feathered headdress...but taking comfort from the fact that I had the full 'red indian' fancy dress and 'wigwam' as a child, and still reliably grew up to be someone who winces at the sparkly headdress and the lingering terminology!

"I is for igloo, ice cream and Indian." I'm with mrz on this and also I think it's a problem that igloo and ice cream are inanimate objects as are, I suspect, the remainder of the examples given to the children. Would "N is for nail, nutmeg and Negro" be acceptable? As the sole people represented in a string of things?

DS2 has just come back from nursery school having learned about the Inuit - and this is in deepest darkest whitest Surrey at a very middle-class nursery school.

So, come to think of it, the letters could correspond to animals as well as inanimate objects so the children could be learning a series something like: apples, bears, cabbages, donuts, elephants, figs, goats, houses, Indians... So I guess the question is more likely to be: would "N is for nutmeg, newt, and Negro" be okay?

What about, and this is my favorite that I've come up with so far, "J is for jaguars, jam, and Japanese."

"W is for wombats, wigwams and women."

"M is for mice, men, and money." Well, I guess you get the idea. Perhaps I should write an alphabet book then.