Prompt students to draw portraits of their families. Provide children with paper and markers, crayons or colored pencils. After having a discussion about family and about all the different people that can be included in a family, encourage the students to draw a picture that illustrates all of the members of their families. After drawing their pictures, invite students to share their portraits. Children will gain an understanding of the many different types of families and that not all families are like their own. For example, they may learn that some families have brothers, some have sisters, some have aunts and uncles and some even have four-legged members.
Have a discussion with your students about how traits are passed from parents to their children; for example, eye color, hair color and features. Ask children to bring in a picture of one of their parents and collect the pictures. Put the pictures in a box and invite one child at a time to pull a picture out of the box. Instruct children to analyze the picture and try to determine whose parent it is. If students correctly match the parent to the student, they give the pictures to the students; if they are incorrect, they place the picture back in the box. Continue until all parent pictures have been matched to students.
Create a paper quilt that illustrates different family traditions. Talk about different family traditions with your students. Provide them with squares of construction paper and crayons, and ask them to draw a picture of one of their favorite family traditions -- a holiday tradition, a meal preparation tradition or even a bedtime tradition. Invite children to share their traditions, and then glue each of the squares of paper onto a large sheet of butcher paper, forming a paper family-traditions patchwork quilt.
Fill your dramatic play center with items that will allow children to act out family roles. Items to include in this themed center include baby dolls, cribs, adult dress-up clothing, food, dishes and other items that are often used at home. Encourage children to pretend that they are a family, and have them use the props to act out different family roles.