New Books, Atlases and Lwiindi!!
Posted
by
Kelly
on 11 Aug 2010
As I’m sure many of you know this project isn’t just about teaching children to read, it’s so much more than that. We aim to encourage children to use their imagination, to become individuals using creativity and imaginative ideas to achieve this. We want to help boost their confidence, to teach them that books can be fun and rewarding, whilst at the same time, ensuring there is also an exchange of ideas and learning about different cultures that goes on.
We had a large delivery of books from the UK last month and we were all very excited to unpack the 9 boxes and meet our new arrivals! We were happy to find a large range of non fiction books, which for the older children are ideal because as well as reading they are learning new facts about the world that they live in! There were lots of books about creatures from the world, with different questions in the contents pages. We have been using these to teach the children about contents pages, indexes, glossaries and also the idea that it is ok to not read a book from start to finish when you want to find out a particular fact. So asking each one to choose and question and then turn to the relevant page to read the answer proved difficult at first but once they had the idea there was no stopping them! Even us “adults” are learning new things and “fact of the day” has been a regular feature on the drive home. For example did you know that hippos can get sunburnt and giraffes can make no sound!!
Maps and atlases are some of the most popular resources that we have. There are so many activities and books that can be linked to them! The Zambian curriculum has no provision for geography and the children know very little about anywhere outside Zambia, but they are so interested in other countries, cultures, flags and people that this is a great area to base our sessions! There was a range of Oxfam books focussing on the topics of Homes, Playtime, Bicycles and Hair around the world and the young children loved to look at the photos are other children around the world and read about how they differ from children in Zambia! Lots of rowdy team games of finding countries on maps or identifying different flags ensued, followed by a craft activity of maybe making a pipe cleaner bicycle or a house from cereal boxes and straw!!
Last Monday was a public holiday and we all went off into the bush to attend the lwiindi ceremony of chief Mukuni. This is a traditional Toka-Leya ceremony where the people honour their chief and pray for rains in the coming wet season! There were many dancers and musicians from different tribes around the southern province and we were lucky enough to see some of them performing at very close quarters. The ceremony was attended by the Zambian President, Rupiah Banda, and I’m afraid to say his speech was not the highlight of the day. Instead it was seeing ordinary Zambiams enjoying the festivities, although there is often a bizarre mix of old and new. An elderly Zambian lady dressed in complete traditional Chitenja fabric who then pulls a mobile phone out of her pocket or a young Zambian dancer wearing an animal skin loin cloth and feather headdress but also Nike trainers!
Next week school holidays begin and we are planning week long holiday clubs, the first week at Maanu Mbwami with a project based on the continents! I’m sure that many of the children we be coming, despite it being holidays because when I told them this week, we would be there everyday soon, they were super – excited, so let’s see what happens!