An excellent way for children to connect with other cultures is listening to music. Tell the students about a country and play a few different traditional musical pieces from that country. Encourage them to dance along to the music in whatever way they feel. You can also provide instruments that originate in that country for them to play. For example, you can play Japanese shamisen music and provide a toy shamisen for them to play and talk about the importance of the instrument and in what situations the music was played.
Art projects offer a way to connect to other cultures. Have the children paint different objects for different countries. For several countries in South America, toddlers can paint prefabricated masks in celebration of carnival and once the masks are dry, they can have their own carnival parade. To teach toddlers about China, have them paint a paper and then stamp Chinese calligraphy for the emotion they think fits their picture the best.
An interactive cultural activity for toddlers is pretend to be Native Americans and trade brightly colored pony beads with each other so they can collect many different colors of beads. Assign groups of children to different Native American groups that you match with specific colors. Have the children tell each other 1 fact about their group when they trade a bead such as where the group lived or what kind of houses they lived in. Then they can string the beads they've collected onto a leather string to wear as a necklace. You can make this an all day activity by giving them additional beads for helping each other and good behavior.
Teach toddlers about other cultures by reading them fairy tales from other cultures and see how those cultures are similar to their own. Start with a familiar story and then read similar stories from other cultures that have the same theme. Ask the children which characters in the original story match with which characters in the other culture's version. One story example is a Cinderella story. Almost every child knows the story of Cinderella and there are many variations from different cultures around the world.