Kanga Necklaces

This week we read a book called 'The Sun, the Wind and Tashira'. It is about a girl who lives in Namibia. She wears a lot of bracelets and necklaces. We think they are beautiful. So, this week we made our own jewellery.

Tashira is a story about a girl who really loves colours.

We made necklaces out of kangas. A kanga is a colourful piece of cloth, a bit like a sarong, that we use for all sorts of different things like carrying babies and wearing as clothes. The material was cut into strips and then sewn into a tube.

Then we collected stones to use as beads. We tied a knot at one end of the tube so that the stones would not fall out.

Thanks Karen for helping out.

After we had tied the knot, we put in a stone and pushed it all the way to the bottom. Then we tied another knot and put in another stone. We continued until we had put about 8 or 9 stones. Then we tied a knot at the end.

We love the necklaces we made. We loved wearing them and posing for lots and lots of photos.

After we made the necklaces we had a guessing game. We had to guess how many necklaces there were. Doris guessed 41 and she was right! We were all very surprised!

The students from Avenel Primary School, in Australia, are going to sell some of our jewellery to raise money for STA. Teacher Lauren is going to sell the rest of the jewellery so that we can get some more great books like 'The Sun, the Wind and Tashira'.

We want to make more necklaces to give to our family and friends. They are so bright and colourful!

Questions:
1. What equipment do you need to make kanga necklaces?
2. How many necklaces did we make?
3. Think about what is in your classroom. What jewellery could you make?
4. What is a good name for our necklaces?
5. A lot of people in Tanzania wear jewellery. Do people in your country wear jewellery? What does it look like?

Building at STA

It may be the holidays but lots has been happening at Steven Tito Academy. Since our school only opened last year we are still building so that we can get more students. We are also making a garden so that we can grow food to eat. We think it is important to learn about the environment and how food is grown. Food tastes better when you grow it yourself!

Our toilet building has recently been painted, on the outside and inside. It looks great.

The first coat of paint on the toilet building

The finished toilet building.

 Wanstead High School students from London came and visited the school. They painted the inside walls. Thanks Wanstead!

The New Classroom
Thanks to a very generous donation we have also been able to start work on a second classroom. With the new classroom we will be able to have more students attend STA next year. We can't wait until the classroom is finished.

The foundation done

Up go the walls

View from the front of the school

We are also soon going to have a new pre-school classroom. We'll keep you posted on the developments.

Greening the School
We are starting small but aiming big! We have planted some cow peas and flowers in a small area around the flag post at school. With some help from friends, we will also be building a garden, with a fence to stop the cows from getting in an eating all the plants. We hope to start the garden when we get back to school in a few weeks.

Kids from the Baobab Home, a children's home on the site of the school help with the planting.

Questions:
1. Design a new building for your school (maybe a library or a new classroom). Make it the way you would like it. Be creative!
2. Count the buildings in your school? How many do you have?
3. Which room is the biggest in your school? How will you figure it out?
4. Which buildings do you think are the most important in your school? Why?

Plays

A few weeks ago, we were lucky enough to have a group of students from Geneva International School in Switzerland come and visit us. They helped us make up our own plays. We learnt some new games for performing arts and then we broke up into three groups to make our plays.

We had to work together to decide what our play would be about and we had to come up with the story and the characters.

Group 1's play was about a princess who was locked in a tower. Then her friends came to rescue her from the monster who had locked her up.

The mean guard locking up the princess.

Coming up with a rescue plan.

Group 2 also had a princess in their play. Sabra played the role of the beautiful princess who got lost at the market and was eventually found by the prince.

Going to the market on a horse.

Group 3's play was also very interesting and fun to watch. Their story was about a man who came and killed a family's horse. So the family bought a tiger and when the man came back the tiger ate his leg. The family saved him and he promised never to kill a horse again.

Group 3 practising their play.

Salim did a great job as the horse who tells the family that the other horse has been killed. Watch the video and hear his great horse noises.

Justis, in the role of the horse killer, comes back again the next night while the family is sleeping and is surprised to find a tiger! The tiger quickly starts eating his leg. The family saves him and then he promises never to hurt a horse again!

We had a lot of fun making up, rehearsing and performing our plays. At the end of the year we will be doing a whole school play. We are looking forward to it. We have already started practising dances and songs.

Questions:
1. If you could write your own play, what would it be about?
2. Have you ever been in a play? If yes, which character were you?
3. How many plays did we perform?
4. What was the moral of Group 3's play?
5. Do you know any stories with princesses in them? What happens in the story?

Lots of Letters

In Prep and Standard 1 we have been learning all the letters of the alphabet. We know that a letter has a name and a sound. Sometimes we forget the sound and sometimes we forget the name but we keep trying.

We have a letter of the week every week. When 'D' was the letter of the week we made 'dotty Ds'. We had to glue the dots onto the letter. Then we practised saying the sound. Doris was very happy because her name starts with the letter 'D'.

We can read words by sounding them out. We say the sound of each letter and then blend the sounds together. Then we can say the word. We practise letter sounds with different games. One game we play is that everyone gets a letter. Then three people stand up and make a word. Someone has to sound out the word for the class.

One day, we made the shape of each of the letters we had learned. We used our bodies to make the letters. Can you guess the letters we are trying to make?

Did you guess them? It was  N, T, S, O and A!

We also like watching videos about letters and singing the ABC song. One video we really like is the Phonics Song. Click on the link below to watch it yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BELlZKpi1Zs

Questions:
1. Do you have a favourite letter? What is it?
2. What letter does your first name start with? What about your last name?
3. Which letters have straight lines?
4. Which words can you make using the letters A, O, P, N, T, S and D?
5. What is sounding out? How does sounding out help us to read?