African Arts Week- A Huge Success!
Key Stage One and Foundation Stage children have enjoyed a fantastic arts themed week based around the continent of Africa.
The week was planned and designed in order to enable the children to gain an insight into different cultures and customs of the African people. The children learned about the geography of the continent, foods, animals, clothing and jewellery, music, singing and dance, as well as the different forms of African artwork.
Read on to find out more about our visiting artists for the week, see more photos and find out more about the types of activities that took place.
Throughout the week, the children read and studied African multicultural texts in Literacy, leading to drama and role-play work. The Foundation Stage read Handa’s Surprise and Handa’s Eggs and Key Stage One focused on Handa’s Surprise and Grace’s Family. These Literacy texts also provided the children with a stimulus to support their artwork and exotic fruits, animals and animal skin prints where produced by the pupils as a result.
The children in the Foundation Stage also did some textile work in the form of tie-dye, to produce Handa’s African dress. They also explored the five senses and developed their chopping and mixing skills by using the exotic fruits in the story, to make a delicious fruit salad. The Nursery children also used their garden as an African village for the week, developing children’s role-play and language skills.
The children in Key Stage One explored various printing techniques to re-create African print works. The children looked at and discussed various forms of African artwork and used this in their own work. The use of bold, bright colours was a huge focus for the pupils. The children sketched an animal and exotic fruit from Handa’s Surprise, using chalks and charcoal to colour. Clay was also used by the pupils in order to re-create a design of a traditional African mask, used by the African people in tribal dances.
In addition to the work in the classroom, we were also fortunate to have some visiting artists in school to help the pupils gain further insight into the African culture. We had a storyteller in school with a full size baby elephant puppet, to help her tell the story. The children waved palm leaves and participated fully as the story was told. We also sang African songs while the tune was played on an African Thumb Piano.
To finish off the week and end our fantastic learning journey, we were able to have Famwell visiting in school. He taught all the children how to play the Djembe Drums. The children all got their own drum and had 45 minutes identifying tunes and learning how to tap rhythms and beats. The children in Year 3 and 4 got a chance to learn some traditional African dancing from Famwell and, at the end of the day, a special celebratory assembly was held for the children to demonstrate their dancing, singing and drumming skills.
To celebrate our hard work, the Infant hall now has all the African art proudly on display. It contains interactive activities also: Djembe drums and a quiz feature on display also.
A brilliant time was had by children and teachers and so much was learned by all.
