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This week we have been celebrating Black History Month through a series of activities. This year’s focus is ‘Time for Change: Action not Words’, with the emphasis being in order to achieve a better tomorrow, we can’t just focus on the past. We have explored how we can all be our best selves to achieve a better future through some fantastic activities this week with more to look forward to next week.
‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world’ – Nelson Mandela.
We started off Black History Month with a visit to the playground tent where some of our lovely grown-ups set up a range of tables for us to explore many different things. We tried on African clothing called Ankara and Gaila hats, explored foods, listened and played drums and calabash’s, looked at different games and pictures and met a lovely author called Dele from Kunda Kids. Then to celebrate the end we enjoyed dancing to music by a steel band.
Mrs Harvey set up a lovely workshop for us and we had a visit from Nicole and her story tree. We sang songs and listened to the story all about Boone the Banana. Boone the Banana had many similarities and differences to other fruits in the story which made us think about what makes us the same and what makes us different.
In the classroom we enjoyed reading Handa’s surprise, we set up our own café with lots of fruits and vegetables, made our own baskets by weaving materials, explored patterns, created African masks and jewellery, did some observational drawing of a selection of fruits and also made our own African outfits. We have also learnt about some famous inventors such as Garrett Morgan who invented the traffic light; Lewis Latimer – light bulb; Patricia Bath – laser surgical device surgery; Marie Van Brittan Brown – home security and then we began to think about how we can make a change to the world.
In phonics we have learnt the sounds n, ch, s, ee, these can be revisited using your flashcards and also your reading pages. Ch and ee are the first digraphs we have learnt, can you remember what a digraph is? It is two letters that make one sound!
During our maths sessions, we have been practising our counting in different ways. We sorted the best way to count a variety of different objects, how to place in order, how to group as well as counting thing we couldn’t see but could hear. We even began to use new resources such as number fans to show the number we thought we counted.
