How have you communicated in ways to demonstrate sensitivty and responsiveness to sociological and linguistic differences?

Today at my tutoring I did the usually working on blending with the kindergartners, and ending sounds with the first graders.  Then during my observing of the kindergartners, the teacher had me go around the room and help students with their stories on what they can see in a bakery. While working with student he seemed a to be having a lot of trouble coming up with a third thing that he could see in a bakery. He already had that he could see cookies and cakes, so to help him out I listed a bunch of food and had him decide if that would be in a bakery of not.  Then he said "pan" would be found in a bakery, an I said that he was right pans would be found in a bakery and then one of the others kids at the table who spoke Spanish said "pan" is Spanish for bread.
Having a language barrier between you and your students can cause many problems even  on the simplest activities.

The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assesment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accomodate sociological differences that affect learning. How might the teacher be responsive to the linguistic, ethnic, and sociological characteristics of the students in his or her assessment practices?

No matter how similar you make think students are in the end they are all individual learners who all learn at different rates.  So a vary of activities and assignments need to be done in the classroom so all students have an equal oppurtunity to learn.  The teacher I work with has different books and activities for me to do with the students every week so the students dont get bored and they have many different ways to learn the same material.  For the last two weeks I have been working on blending sounds with them and we read two books with the words in them and then did a blasketball, and a penny blending game.
Then today when I was observing in the clasroom I was helping them write a storu about a playground and for them its more like two or three sentences.  Then they had to draw a picture to go along with theb story, most students wrote about slides, tire swings, mokey bars, and swing sets.  The teachers uses this as an assesment to determione if students can form sentences and understand the use of periods at the end of a sentence and capitol letters. As I was sitting at one table helping a few students out, then one girl says to me completely out of the blue elephants are hairy.  I look at the teacher who had heard the comment and we both just start dying laughing.  It was completly out of  the blue and she is right the are hairy but most kindergarteners would say monkies are hairy.  It was just one of thosew moments that made me smile and appreciate the innocence of childhood.