African Day

An African Day at Greenford School
by  Stickland's School

Every year the Beaminster Cluster brings children, from six primary schools in the Beaminster area, together to share learning activities.  This year under the theme developing thinking skills, the Cluster anted to celebrate another culture through art, music and dance.   The larger primaries, St Mary’s Beaminster and Greenford, were hosts to over 400 children in four days.  Every child participated in three workshops and the following reports show how involved the children were.  

The African Day was brilliant – the two artists were very friendly, although sometimes difficult to understand.  I have now learnt a drum move and a really cool chicken dance. We have learnt that everybody in Ghana is named after the day of the week on which they are born.  Altogether my whole class enjoyed what they learnt and had lots of fun.    Esther (Year 6)

Our group did dance with Joe (Emmanuel Lartey) first.  It was fun but quite hard to remember the steps.  I had to listen very hard because Joe put his sentences together a different way round than us and spoke very, very fast which I am not used to.   I had waited all day to do music and we did it at last with NanaYaw.  He played some tunes on the xylophone and children tried until they found a tune they could play.  Then he taught us some drumming, which was really fun.  At the end we performed for all the other children.  Kris (Year 4)

First I went to the printing table where you dented a pattern onto a polystyrene tile with a pencil.  It was covered with ink and then used to make a print onto our school’s piece of cloth. The next table were working with clay.  I rolled out some clay and used special tools to draw patterns on my tile.  At the last table they were doing batik work using hot wax, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time, but that didn’t matter really as I had lots of fun on the other two tables.  Ellie (Year 4)

We went to a different classroom and sat down next to a drum and learnt some names, like one type called Panlogo that was native to Ghana and another called Jembae.  We learnt a song called Kalayla, which means Harvest.  Matthew (Year 6)